What SF's 105.7 today has in common with LA's KHJ from 1972

While getting my gears greased to tackle my grading chores on this Ides of March, I stumbled across
this item on SF Gate:

"Bay Area Latino radio station won't stop playing Nelly's 'Hot in Herre'"

"Bay Area radio station Latino Mix, 105.7 (Santa Clara) and 100.7 (San Rafael), and has had a Nelly hit from 2002 on repeat since around 3 p.m. Friday."

Twitter is all abuzz (Or is that Buzz is all a'twitter?). Looks like the hashtag du jour is #nelly1057

This immediately brought back memories of the time that legendary KHJ DJ Robert W. Morgan infamously played Donny Osmond's must-inject-insulin-now "Puppy Love" for about 1.5 hours straight.

The L.A. Times' Steve Harvey reminisced about that incident 32 years later:

"Police visited the Melrose Avenue studios of KHJ in Hollywood 'after receiving several phone calls from listeners who thought something was wrong because morning man Robert W. Morgan played Donny Osmond's 'Puppy Love' over and over for an hour and a half,' (Historian Jim) Hawthorne wrote.

"'The fear was that the station had been taken over by crazed fans of the 14-year-old singer'."

I listened in fascination for most of those 90 minutes even though "Puppy Love" was probably the worst pop single of all time at that time, which is why Robert W. Morgan played it.

"(Morgan) explained he "had grown so weary of the 'teeny boppers' requesting the song, he decided to play it repeatedly until the listeners tired of hearing it." Good Morgan!"

I won't be listening to "Hot in Herre" -- largely in fear because I don't want to find out what "Herre" means.

In reading Harvey's piece, however, I noticed that the "Puppy Love" incident occurred on March 15, 1972. Today is also March 15.

According to the SFGate blog, 105.7 may be pulling out the obnoxious stops because it is relaunching from "Latino Mix" to "Hot 105.7."

So the timing of it is either a remarkable coincidence, or a fabulous nod to radio history. I like to think it's the latter.

Calling yourself a journalist doesn't mean you are one

I am not good enough to draw this

Lots and lots of people call themselves journalists. That's like me drawing a stick figure and calling myself an artist.

I can't draw. And way too many of today's "journalists" have no business saying what they do is journalism.

Like this tired, here-we-go-again piece from the March 12, 2014 edition of SF Weekly, "Exit Music: Musicians Are Leaving San Francisco. Can the City's Legendary Scene Survive?

The issue is that good journalism is more than just assembling a bunch of links together and forming an opinion about it. Or taking a photograph or video on a smartphone and posting it to Twitter. Or writing a blog.

But that's what a lot of today's "journalists" think journalism is. 

Good journalism needs context and perspective and a sense of history and knowledge of what came before today. Good journalism also needs editors who can provide a check on the rampant egocentrism that most journalists--real ones and pretend ones--are known to have.

Good journalism also needs originality. But here, in San Francisco, where all the millennials consider themselves to be a *something* (writer, artist, musicians, poets, entrepreneurs) despite a decided lack of experience and credentials, there is also rampant parroting of the same old themes.

Photo courtesy HuffingtonPost

It goes something like this. No, wait. It goes exactly like this: "Musicians and artists are leaving San Francisco, and so am I, and the city I have lived in for 31 months *will never be the sameeeeeeee*"

Like "The San Francisco Exodus" in TheAtlanticCities.com

Like the nauseating "Goodbye San Francisco, You're a Passionate Lover," that ran a few months ago in HuffPost.

Like "Ty Segall and John Dwyer on Why So Many Musicians Are Leaving San Francisco for L.A." (Full disclosure: I have no idea who Ty Segall and John Dwyer are, and I bet nobody will in 10 years, either).

Like this ai-yi-yi-yi piece (count the number of times the writer writes the words "I" or "me"): "Dave Eggers, The Circle and Why I’m Leaving the Bay Area."

But the best one is this, from the San Francisco Chronicle: "Heading Out of Town / Artists leave San Francisco for less expensive digs in New York, Los Angeles and even Wonder Valley."

You know why it's the best? Because if you check the timestamp, it was written in 2000.

If I could draw me right now, I would draw this. From this site

And that's the point. Things have always changed. This is nothing new. These woe-is-me-because-me-is-all-who-matters dollops of drivel have no perspective, no context, no sense of history, and no sense of wonder.

However, the lazy narrative has been "Oh no, damned gentrification, we'll never be the same." 


The city is changing because musicians and artists are leaving? Because all the good places are closing? Well, there are plenty of new ones, too: Brick and Mortar, Amnesia, the Chapel, the New Parish...

I will always mourn the absence of, say, the Stone, the Keystone, the Avalon, Winterland, Wolfgangs, the I-Beam, the Longbranch and Keystone Berkeley, and on and on and on. It's a shame they had to close.

A real journalist would know those things, because a real journalist would do some real research. And perhaps that real research would be demanded by an editor who wouldn't allow the same thing to be written over and over and over again. 

I'll call them journalists when they do real journalism.

Then again, maybe if they call me an artist, I'll change my mind.

SF Chronicle education stenographer is pretty rank

Looks like the San Francisco Chronicle education "reporter" who completely botched the CCSF accreditation story just posted a blog about the Times Higher Education rankings of the world's universities.

First, the important news:

Cal ranks No. 8 and is the world's top public university. Go Bears!

Meanwhile, after noting she had to look up the term "knowledge transfer" -- she's an education reporter? -- she also notes that Caltech is No. 1, Harvard and Oxford are tied for No. 2, and "#3 is oddly missing."

As my students sometimes say, "Derp."

(It's because there are three schools there. The next school is No. 4, which this year happens to be the junior university down in Palo Alto).

'Course, the point is this: You ask a question, you answer the question. It's not like the answer isn't out there.

-------

Update! Update! (10 a.m., March 8, 2014):
This is the stenographer's "defense" in the comments section of the blog:

"you could be right if rankings are restricted to a certain number of schools. But there's no inherent reason why a school that is slightly less good than two tied for second place can't be labeled 'third.'"

I find this troubling because she is unable to admit a mistake, and also because there are many other commenters who pointed out the same thing. Lack of knowledge transfer, indeed.

Dumb is good III: We elect these people

On the day that Colorado's legalized marijuana law took effect, the satire site Daily Currant ran a funny piece:

Marijuana Overdoses Kill 37 in Colorado On First Day of Legalization

Lots of people fell for it, because people consume the empty calories of most content on the Interwebs as if they were inhaling so many Taco Bell new breakfast waffle tacos: mindlessly and breathlessly. In this environment, hoaxes look like just like facts.

Meet Police Chief Doo Fuss.
Photo: Baltimore Sun

Even to the police chief of Annapolis, MD:

Annapolis police chief apologizes for marijuana misspeak

 

...proving, once and for all, that Mike Judge's "Idiocracy" is a documentary.
 

 

Dumb is good II: Descending further into Idiocracy

One of the great features, benefits and overarching promises of the Interwebs was its unlimited archiving capacity.

You didn't have to go to the library to read whatever back issues they had; websites -- particularly news and information websites -- could offer easy access to past issues and/or articles with relative ease. And often for free.

Now there's this:

U.S. News deletes archived web content published before 2007

The reason?

"A new content management system ... could not effectively keep archived web content published prior to 2007 on our site."

As with the ninny in my first "Dumb is Good" post, the decision-makers at U.S. News & World Report are proving to be exceptionally poor gatekeepers of their site and of seminal web standards themselves.  Their actions, certain to be copied and mimicked "because everybody else is doing it," degrade high standards and quality.

In this case, the magazine has chosen to essentially whitewash history for the sake of economics. Editors say the content will be available on Lexus-Nexus, but the cost of that is prohibitive for the masses.

Combined with the apparent upcoming loss of Net Neutrality, the so-called "democratization" of information is taking hit after hit. And with the degradation of the written word championed by the Abraham Hyatts of the world, we're seeing less and less of the Information Highway and more of what it has turned into today: the Information Stupidhighway.

Dumb is good

Nothing crystallizes the growing battle between tradition and quality vs. profit and vapidity than this bit of drool by a full-of-himself techie named Abraham Hyatt:

Whatever you do, Vice, don't hire that copyeditor

Although he appears to have some experience in the field, he's clearly sold on the idea that revenue and profit are the only things that matter in digital journalism. That may be true for the profit-seekers, but there are still those of us who believe that quality is what counts in this business.

We also understand that "online audiences don’t notice the majority of the work a copyeditor does" because the only thing a good reader notices is when a copyeditor doesn't catch a mistake. It's like being a baseball umpire: the great ones are never noticed because they're doing the job well.

The Internet has enabled anybody with a computer connection to be a publisher. This has naturally degraded the quality of writing in general because so many people don't practice proper language skills. But good writing will always require proper sentence structure, solid punctuation, appropriate word choices, logical organization, facts that have been checked ... and all the other things that editors are responsible for.

Good writing is also good to read, which is the point. Sloppy writing? I'll leave that to Mr. Hyatt, who brags "the first thing I did was fire the copyeditors," and continues to write: "No one told us they came to our site because we had fewer typos than TechCruch."

If you didn't spot the typo, that's OK. A good copyeditor would have, and in the process protected whatever credibility that guy has remaining. But he's just interested in counting beans, anyway.

Choose your verbs carefully

More brilliance from AP, which has the worst editors in the entire whole wide world:

Pot cake leads to brief coma for Spanish student

"Chivite say the others were found to be suffering from euphoria..."

I'm in!