Cris Carter: African-Americans, unlike other people, dislike being bored

A couple years ago, I wrote about the dearth of black baseball players. There were more black players on the Dodgers in 1950 than there are today, I wrote.

On ESPN’s “Mike & Mike” show yesterday, legendary NFL wide receiver Cris Carter tried to explain:

Mike Greenberg: How much attention to you pay to baseball, generally? As a general rule? You watch a lot of baseball or not so much?

Cris Carter: It’s too boring. It’s too slow. And I think it’s a lot of the reason why we don’t see a lot of African-Americans playing baseball. Or they stop at a very young age. Because it’s a slow game. And the other games — football and basketball — are far more exciting.

Greenberg changed the subject, so we never learned why Carter feels that a "boring" game like baseball attracts Hispanics but repels African-Americans.

The Brookland Metro mourns the King of Pop

With all the talk about newspapers versus blogs, it didn't occur to me that I could just get my news from the concrete wall accross from the Metro tracks.

Way to stay timely, graffiti artists.

Repeating a falsehood about George H.W. Bush

Today, the New York Times celebrates the 35th anniversary of the bar code.

Unfortunately, the article's third paragraph repeats a common misconception: In 1992, then-President Bush saw an ordinary grocery scanner and was surprised by the amazing technology.

Not only is that story false, but the New York Times has already issued an apology for originating the bogus report.¹

I suppose this is what happens when newspapers lay off newsroom staffers.


¹According to Snopes, the myth originated in a front-page New York Times story written by Andrew Rosenthal — a reporter who hadn't been present at the event. According to the lone reporter at the 1992 event, Gregg McDonald of the Houston Chronicle, the president was looking at a new type of scanner that could weigh groceries and read mangled and torn bar codes. Newsweek viewed a tape of the event and wrote that Bush appeared "hardly amazed."

A victory for newspapers

How did Gina Smith of The State newspaper know to show up at the Atlanta airport at 6:15 a.m. yesterday to meet Mark Sanford as he walked off an airplane arriving from Buenos Aires?

This tip from an airline passenger on Sanford's aircraft: “We’ve seen your governor on an airplane. He’s not on the Appalachian Trail.” According to the New York Times, the tipster mentioned that Sanford would be returning from Argentina.

Aha! A fellow passenger turned him in — possibly while the airplane was still at the gate in Buenos Aires, given that there was no WiFi on the flight itself.

The type of person who sends out Internet messages while an airplane is preparing for departure but still at the gate, it seems to me, would be more likely than the average person to get news from blogs.

And yet this tipster sent the message to a newspaper, not a blog.

Score one for the legacy news industry!

According to sources in Afghanistan, here's the latest Favre news

Yesterday, a sports blog called ProFootballTalk¹ published an article about Brett Favre secretly signing a contract with the Minnesota Vikings in which the author credited low journalistic standards for his news scoop. The writer bragged that the rumor comes from the troops in Afghanistan: "We can (and will) post rumors, without adhering to the two-source nonsense that paralyzes the flow of information about sports."

Sigh. This is precisely why it is upsetting that newspapers are folding.²

I'm not here to defend the print medium's print medium. Unlike others, I don't care whether the news is printed on paper or distributed online. But we need a legitimate news gathering-and-reporting mechanism.

The United States has a free press, sure, but we also need a credible press. That is, even though newspapers are laying off journalists, we still need the same amount of news.

The Huffington Post, which gets more than 5 million unique visitors per month, has 61 full-time paid staffers.³

If newspaper journalists can find jobs with blogs, great. But a new medium need not have weaker journalistic standards. Facts still need to be checked, for instance.


¹It's a blog, yes, but it struck a partnership earlier this month that makes it part of the NBC empire.
²For much more on why we need newspapers, or at least the journalism that newspapers have provided for over a hundred years, click here.
³According to an article published today on Advertising Age's Mediaworks blog.

Get your Drank on

A colleague found out about Drank Beverage, which bills itself as the first "extreme relaxation" drink to hit the market, via Twitter.

Presumably, Drank seeks to simulate the experience of "Purple Drank," which is codeine and promethazine mixed with Sprite. Instead of prescription drugs, Drank contains melatonin.

Drank's slogan is "Slow Your Roll."

We decided to put it to the test. (Click here for HD.)

Davidson College's dirty laundry

Last year, we learned that tuition to Davidson College includes a laundry and dry cleaning service fee.¹

Writing in today's New York Times, Tamar Lewin says Davidson is cutting back the laundry service in an effort to save $150,000.


¹Students write or sew their ID number on all their clothes and drop off their dirty laundry at the Lula Bell Houston laundry facility (during business hours, of course). The clean clothes are folded and ready for pickup within 48 hours of drop off.

Iranian tweets

I’m no expert about the situation in Iran. But as a media consumer, I’ve been fascinated by the unfolding events.

You know the story: Political tumult has been growing since last week’s disputed election. Two-thirds of the country is younger than 30 years old, many of whom support challenger Mir Hussein Moussavi¹ in his bid to unseat the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Iranian government has tried to restrict online communications through traditional means.

But it hasn’t really worked, due to an explosion of new media sites operating outside the government firewall.

While sites like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr are getting a lot of credit for organizing the election protests, Evgeny Morozov warns us not to go overboard in our praise for social media.

Writing on Foreign Policy’s “net.effect” blog, he says:

"Overall, I am skeptical about the claims that Twitter has been instrumental in organizing the protests. I grant that it may have been very influential in publicizing them. But I'd like to see tangible evidence that 10 random Iranians found each other via Twitter and – communicating in Farsi –actually planned a rally"

Still, the U.S. government believes in the important role of social media sites. According to CNN’s AC360 blog, the U.S. State Department asked Twitter not to take its site down for scheduled maintenance this week to ensure the stream of information from Iran continues uninterrupted. The U.S. government, CNN writes, is ”paying very close attention to Twitter and other sites to get information on the situation in Iran.”

So there it is. The perfect contrast between one government that is trying to shut down all social media sites and another that is trying to ensure that the sites stay up.

¹As a side note, Mousavi was once the editor-in-chief the Jomhouri-Eslami. I can't decide whether that is pertinent to this story of media censorship.

What are you eating under there?

When a Dallas-area school district prohibited girls from wearing shirts that show skin lower than 4 inches from the collarbone, Eric and Joel questioned how the schools enforced the law. Do they employ a faculty member to identify and confirm the existence of non-complying students, the two men wanted to know?

I don't have the answer to that question, but I have learned of a potentially more intrusive assignment: a Florida city voted earlier this month to require women working for the city to wear bras.¹

All employees must wear underwear. Oh, and deodorant.

Joel Anderson of the St. Petersburgh Times has more on the Brooksville City Council's 4-1 vote.


¹Ironically, the new rule requires bras but bans halter tops, which, as we've learned, comes from the German word büstenhalter, meaning "busts holder."

Fat acceptance

United and Southwest charge obese passengers for two seats if they can’t sit in a single seat without spillover.

"We're willing to pay for what we are rightfully using," Peggy Howell, spokeswoman for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, told Scott McCartney of the Wall Street Journal.

If it happens that the obese flier is adjacent to an otherwise empty seat, there’s no extra charge. More than 97 percent of obese fliers who buy a second seat end up with a refund for that reason, McCartney writes.

Meanwhile, I’m interested in the existence of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

According to their site, it is an organization founded in 1969 that is dedicated to “improving the quality of life for fat people.”

The Oakland A

Today we will be discussing the Oakland Athletics, also known as the Oakland A's.

In school, I learned that apostrophes are not used to denote plurals. That would mean it should be Oakland As.

However, the AP Style Guide on my desk says to use an apostrophe to denote plurals of a single letter (but not multiple-letter combinations). That would mean Oakland A's is correct.

Still, that implies that the A stands for "Athletic" in the singular form, which requires us to make it plural each time.

Why can't the A stand for "Athletics"? That way, we could clear up any confusion.

It would be the Oakland A.

The Zack Morris phone, back and better than ever

You should be ashamed of yourself. How dare you not wake me up last night to tell me that Zack Morris, in character, was a guest on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon?

I mean, you know I love Zack Morris. You couldn't possibly know me without knowing that.

He was the first television character to carry a cell phone. What a guy.

I wrote a college paper about Saved by the Bell, the first TV show to be produced by one network (NBC) for a competing network (Disney). The show began as a prime-time program for adults. When it moved a year later to NBC, the network wanted it to be a Saturday morning children's show instead. A show for kids employs different tactics (dream sequences, freezing the action through time outs) than one for adults, and rarely have we had the opportunity to compare such approaches in the same program.

It was an excellent paper and received an AB¹ from professor Julie D'Acci.


¹Yes, that's a real grade. That's how they do things at UW-Madison, where I spent one semester of my life. It goes A, AB, B, BC, C, etc. Weird, huh?

Obamamobile

We saw the Obamamobile yesterday as it drove down Columbia Rd. in Columbia Heights. It was very exciting.

ESPN The Capitalist

In the mid-to-late 1990s, newspapers began putting their content online.

At that time, an online commerce system was not terribly developed. Most people were not comfortable typing their credit card numbers onto a Web page. Sure, there were a few early adopters who shopped online, but most people 15 years ago preferred to pay for purchases in person, over the phone or through the mail.

As a result, nearly all newspapers decided not to charge for access to their content. As time went by, we became more comfortable with online commerce. Last year, Americans spent $204 billion online.¹ Yet online access to most newspapers remains free.

ESPN The Magazine plans to change that model.

Beginning in August, ESPN will put the content from its magazine on a password-protected page available only to "ESPN Insiders" who pay $39.95 per year. There are two possible advantages to ESPN of charging for online access:

1. Create a new revenue source.
2. Charge more for the existing online ads, since subscribing customers are likely to stay on the site longer, providing a more engaged audience for advertisers paying by the "impression."

¹According to the National Retail Federation.

Huh?

The National Review's June 22 issue has hit the newsstands. I did not read the article, but it appears they are comparing Sonia Sotomayor with the Buddha. I don't get it.

Tucker Bounds, you're welcome back on the show

When Campbell Brown left CNN to take maternity leave, her show was called "Campbell Brown. No Bias, No Bull."

She returned to television this week, but the name of her program has changed to, simply, "Campbell Brown."

It's only logical to assume that her show may finally contain a bit of bias and/or bull.

Rob Dibble, you're on notice

The Sports Business Journal has released the TV ratings for the first two months of the Major League Baseball season, and the news isn't pretty for the Washington Nationals.

• About 12,000 households in the D.C. area, on average, are tuning into the Nats games.
• More people in the D.C. market watch the Orioles than the Nats.
• With one exception¹, every other U.S.-based team has attracted a local TV audience more than twice the size of the Nats.
• Despite the magnitude of the low ratings for Nats games, they are 56 percent higher than last year.

¹The Oakland As.

Media guides, RIP

The Wisconsin Badgers will no longer print fancy-pants media guides to provide reporters with information about its sports teams. Reporters can find all the same information at uwbadgers.com.

Jeff Potrykus of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that Michigan and Ohio State have also decided to stop printing media guides for their sports teams.

This cost-cutting decision makes a lot of sense. These glossy books have been obsolete for years, since anyone in need of information in a pinch can find it quickly online. And it's a long-deserved acknowledgment that stats and information should not be restricted only to credentialed reporters.

But still.

I enjoyed the media guides as a kid. When I could get my hands on them, that is. While the Internet is a more efficient medium for storing stats, it cannot replace the experience of flipping through a book of pictures, stats and stories.

The legend of the Midnight Ride was way hardcore

Upon seeing a copy last week of John Singleton Copley's 1768 portrait of Paul Revere, I've decided that the American Revolution-era messenger looked a lot like Jack Black.