The BBC has excellent foreign affairs journalism, The Daily Mail has blog fodder.

One of my favorite sites to waste time is Photoshop Disasters, which posts examples of truly horrendous photo manipulation. Many are magazine covers that have airbrushed their cover models into plastic mannequins, while others are hilarious hatchet jobs that are supposed to be effective advertising.

Sometimes, though, the blog's editors will get photos like this:

See how the videogames this woman is holding are all chopped up? This isn't because she's protesting damaged goods, it's because British tabloid The Daily Mail wants to make sure their photos include good head shots. Photoshop Disasters tracks some other egregious examples here, and it's clear that these can be called "photo illustrations" only in the loosest sense of the phrase. The Daily Mail, however, doesn't really try to be objective, serious or even credible, so calling out these examples for their manipulation is a moot point.

Of course, there are cases like this, where a photographer tried to create a really great image out of two almost-great photographs. This photoshop disaster ran on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, and people caught onto the sneaky squish-job. Needless to say, the "photo illustrator" was fired.

God Hates Socialized Medicine, quoth the protester

I implore you to take a look at the blog God Hates Protesters. Most of the time it's just cases of photobombing like this:

Other times, the blog's admins post great pictures like this, which is usually not a case of some smarty-pants crashing a protest. These signs are honest-to-God real:

Now, I know I should make some big statement about the media's responsibility to properly inform the general population so they understand that Medicare is pretty darn close to "socialized medicine," but come on. I really wonder if some people just can't be helped. Did they not take a government class? 

Like any good farm girl and beef cattle showman, I learned about socialism through the ingenius Cow Model. 

In which I use a lot of italics to talk about Bad TV Journalism

While in New Orleans last week, the lady whose house we were working on invited us in to her living room at lunchtime to eat some red beans and rice and watch TV. We flipped to Comedy Central and caught Jon Stewart ripping apart Megyn Kelly's timeslot on Fox News. I don't watch a lot of cable TV news period, but this stuff it outrageous. Polling people on the street about what they think health care reform will cost may be an interesting sidenote about the public's general confusion about what the hell is going on in Congress - but it's not the same as actually stating how much health care will cost.

Are those beliefs correct? Who gives a sh*t?

Here's an earlier clip I watched on Jezebel: Jon Stewart On Megyn Kelly: Same Fair & Balanced, Except Without Sleeves

Now, I don't actually sit through a lot of cable TV news, nor do I watch much of The Daily Show. So I can't say for sure whether The Daily Show's researchers and editors just did a good job splicing this stuff together or if indeed Fox News really does suck at giving a damn if their content is sound.

It's bad enough when people watch cable news prime time talk shows and take all that shrieking and slanting and ingest it like straightforward news, its another to dress up what is essentially an uber-biased tirade like it's supposed to be objective TV news presenting.

I don't want to be the person who rags on Fox News all the time, because then someone's gonna call me a liberal communist hippie or something, and I'm not really that either. But I do know that just because you're blonde and pretty and fairly eloquent doesn't mean you're allowed to start interjecting your opinions and leading your interviewees and interviewing Kid Rock for no good reason in a program that's supposed to straight news.



In other news, The Daily Show had Michael Lewis on! To talk about Economics and Mortgages and Stuff and Things, not sports features. I haven't read any of his non-sports stuff, but I probably should. If he can clearly explain the subtleties of left tackle to me, then he can probably teach me about subprime mortgages.

Michael Lewis made me care about left tackles and Shane Battier

Attending Notre Dame has changed my interest in sports journalism. When I say changed, I mean that at the beginning of my freshman year, the ND sports machine took me by the shoulders and shook me violently and exclaimed, "Why haven't you read this great stuff before? Can't you see what you're missing?" From the mythic Grantland Rice and the "four horsemen" to the men's basketball write-ups in The Observer's sports section, I really started to see the art in sports writing. You have to condense a game - either a single contest or the entire genre - into words. And you have to do in a way that will make people read the story, not just scan it for scores and rankings.


Sports features in particular always grab my attention. This is usually because I'm prone to choosing sides for arbitrary reasons: I think it's awesome that Mike Anello is my generation's Rudy (only more athletic), so I scream his name on kick-offs, and cheer like he's one of the Beatles when we hear he got a tackle. I love that Xue Shao and Hongbo Zhen, the eventual gold medalist pairs figure skaters from China, were happily married when they decided to come out of retirement and train for the 2010 Winter Olympics. While stats and physical prowess are really impressive, I'm a sucker for the human-interest angle.


A year ago, my journalism teacher - Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune, if we're into name dropping - sent our class a link to New York Times magazine story about Houston Rockets defensive genius Shane Battier. I balked at the story's length, which was something like 15 pages or so after I reformatted the text in Microsoft Word. But I sat down and read the whole thing, enthralled with this character Battier. He's a cerebral defensive player, meticulously studying his opponents' offensive habits. But his efforts often go unnoticed because his tactics can't be quantified in the stats box. The author does a good job of analyzing and explaining just how Battier is integral yet ignored:

Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.

The author goes on to dissect the odds, the percentages and the processes that define Battier's awesomeness, all in a way that I can understand, even as a relative newbie to the sports journalism world.

I bring up this story because this past Christmas break I read The Blind Side and had the feeling that I was reading a damn good piece of sports journalism wrapped up in an inspiring, book-length human interest feature story. And the style - the gameplay breakdowns, the detailed analysis of the game stats, the methodical yet musical prose - reminded me so much of that NYT magazine story I read the year before. Surprise, surprise, they were both written by Michael Lewis. His excellent writing style coupled with an outstanding ability to repackage highly specialized information into a readable format makes for some truly enjoyable and informative reading.


If you haven't picked up one of his books or read any of his stuff yet, I highly recommend it. When  I read The Blind Side (I still have yet to see the movie), I learned more about the value of offensive linemen and the position of left tackle than I'll ever be able to use in real life, but it sure helps when I'm having friendly arguments with The Observer's sports staff during layout production nights at the office.

More useless information about Megan Fox: She uses a thumb double.

I always love finding little behind-the-scenes stories, especially ones as offbeat as this: "The Faces Behind the Famous Hands", which you can find on Slate. Who comes up with this idea? "Hey, I think people of the world will want to become better informed about the identities and resumes of hand models." And then someone actually goes out and researches this!

But seriously, isn't it cool to know how hand models keep their phalanges looking so nice and smooth? According to this article, it requires a lot of lotion and wearing gloves all the time.



<<< Not exactly what Zoolander told me, but I'll give Slate the benefit of the doubt.

I know it would be such a fun story to do. I love talking to people about things like this: out-of-the-ordinary professions, crazy coincidences, their grooming regimens. It's the kind of information that doesn't really come up in regular conversation but is still so darn fascinating.

Although it's not my life goal to search out the "faces behind famous toes" or "the teeth behind famous lips" (because honestly, disembodied body parts are a little weird if you think too much about them), I do see myself putting together a little click-through photo feature like this.

Video: How to Report the News

Check out this amusing video my boyfriend sent me. His journalism teacher showed it during a class a couple weeks ago:




Sooooo true, right? Just try watching the local and national news tonight and it's maddening how closely they follow this.

While I find parodies like this hilarious, I'm also wary of people picking on media conventions. For one thing, the regular features of a TV news segment - the establishing shots, the voice patterns, the general outline of information - are used for a reason. For the news consumers, these elements help us to process the story and pick up on what elements are important. For the production team and reporters, having some "templates" in mind helps them to meet the increasingly crunched time demands of all news outlets.

So while Charlie Brooker might have made some pretty pointed criticisms here, I'd still rather see these kinds of segments on TV news rather than an artsy but confusing video, or worse, one that was hastily slapped together without any order.

Rick Roll

Rick Reilly really irritates me. I read some of his columns when we has still with Sports Illustrated, but I don't remember him being so darn lazy. Beyond this lovely example of self-plagiarism as documented by Deadspin, he's also prone to cliches. I seriously wonder if he just has a Sports Column Mad Libs application on his iPhone he fills in on the ride to the office.

First of all, there's his current piece up on ESPN.com, about Kelly Kulick, the first female bowler to win a men's tournament. A good topic for a column, sure, but dear God, can he cram more pop culture references into the thing?

Listen! She beat 62 of the best male pros -- straight up -- in arguably the Tour's creamiest event, the Tournament of Champions. And she beat them like egg yolks. She beat Chris Barnes, the No. 1 bowler on the Tour, by 70 pins in the final! That's like beating Emeril by three hams!

That by itself wouldn't be so bad, but as the third or fourth cutesy play on words, it's starting to get tiring.

Here's another gem:

Hello? America? This is the equivalent of "Man Gives Birth!" It's never happened in any ball sport in American history. Kulick, 32, should own Page 1. Somebody should throw her a parade. Or at least a state dinner. Instead, she's gotten one free hair coloring. That's the highlight.

The hair coloring pun actually made me groan.

Of course, of course, she's also the perfect woman "in real life":

A few guys sent her marriage proposals on Facebook. Why not? After all, she works in her father's auto-body shop, can fix a bumper, does yoga, cooks, fishes and meditates. The perfect woman! But other than those shout-outs, nothing, bubkes, silence.

I can understand why this guy got the ESPN gig. He used to write good stuff. But its as if now he really can't be bothered to put any creative effort into his writing. They read like an example of "going overboard with column-writing conventions" in a column-writing textbook. Puns, injustice, references to precendent (there are at least three Billie Jean King quips in this column) and repetition.

But all my objections to his style are moot, since his subject matter is itself a waste of web space. I think its admirable that Reilly wants to draw attention to Kulick's accomplishment. But I can give you a few simple reasons Kulick hasn't been hopping through all the morning talk shows: the Olympics have been going on for the last two weeks - and no one really cares about professional bowling no matter who is winning.