Three great lessons were central David Carr’s memoir the Night of the Gun, published in 2008, which I only recently read. Carr differentiated his story from other self-described ‘junkie memoirs’ by taking two years to rigorously report on his own life, interviewing those closest and uncovering the records that might corroborate.

1. Our pasts are more fungible than we would ever imagine — Surely heightened by an ugly past of addiction and violence, the New York Times columnist had created a very different memory than what, it turned out actually happened. By reporting his own life, he found, indeed, he was the one that had the gun that night (story shared in video below), in addition to quite a few other stories about violence he said he couldn’t have imagined. Most might not have that kind of extreme, but his reporting his life story does bring up an interesting reality.
2. Addiction is a strenuously complicated obstacle — Having recently shared some lessons on addiction and homelessness from my time with a social services agency, it might seem obvious that I was taken by Carr’s ability to write about addiction with experience and directness.
3. Stories are all about marketing — How you tell your story or another’s has everything to do with perception and direction and angle. As Carr wrote, and others took interest in, his story could either be a tidy tale of a father overcoming drugs and welfare to take custody of his twin girls, or abusive addict escaping his mistakes and misdeeds for the height of professional success. …You might have a very different take on those actually very similar stories.

A few favorites pieces shared below.

As I often do after reading a relevant book or story or article, I wanted to share some of my favorite turns of phrase.

• A passage from a 1982 Twin Cities Reader cover he wrote: “He was a visitor from another part of town, and he had seen enough. He stepped out of the crowd and asked the police the wrong question. ‘Why did you have to do that?” That question bought [him] a trip downtown. A short stop at the jail for booking and then over to the hospital to get the answer to his question looked at.” [P. 48]
• He refers to himself as a ‘slow motion kidnapper’ [P. 98]
• Chapter 18 Crack: A brief tutorial [P. 112] — Yup, the whole thing is worth a read, by far the most interesting chapter in the book for a non-user like myself.
• “It is the stopping, the quitting, the walking away that we cannot abide because the ceaseless activity keeps the accounting at bay. The mania of addiction, as expressed by anything — coke, booze, betting, sex — finds renewed traction every time it halts because once the perpetrator stops and sees how deeply and truly his life now sucks, there is only one thing that will make him feel better: more of the same. Often the only thing that imposes limits on someone who is hooked on his own endorphins is money.” [P. 141]
• “The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free,” Herman Melville wrote [P. 303]

I have noticed what I think is a change  in style from the New York Times — or at least it seems new to me –in its use of the phrase “middle class.”

Notice this use of it in this story on the battle brewing on extended so-called “Bush’s tax cuts.”

“But they have pledged to continue the lower tax rates for individuals earning less than $200,000 and families earning less than $250,000 — what Democrats call the middle class.”

That’s a great use of attribution to afford some kind of better description than we have in most other news articles I see. In other stories, I still see the simpler use of the phrase “middle class.” But what the hell does that mean?

Seems like there’s plenty of confusion around just what the middle class is — more directly than an ethereal base of populist nostalgia.

There’s this authenticity that we put on surviving the proletariat, so there’s a chase to fit oneself in the middle class or — even better! — the working class.

It sure would be nice for someone, somewhere to put some kind of distinction on these phrases because they carry great political, social and emotional weight.

As far as I can tell, for now, the phrase ‘middle class values’ basically means avoiding drug use, opening a bank account and having sex missionary style. I’d like for much greater accuracy and transparency for journalists.

It was a big piece riddled with stories of a handful of struggling entrepreneurs and a few buzz-y sites that haven’t prospered, but three paragraphs interested me most.

Let me share them below.

From the final page:

There is, of course, nothing wrong with giving readers what they secretly want every once in a while. The problem arises when you start producing articles solely for the id of the search engines, because some clicks are more valuable than others. This is the conclusion, at least, of Gawker Media’s Nick Denton, one of the first to pay writers according to their page views and now a high-profile skeptic of the practice. Denton built his company on the labor of freelance bloggers, but in the last year, he has moved to hiring them as full-time employees, with set salaries and bonuses­ tied to “unique visitors” — a metric that he says measures the writer’s ability to bring new readers into the fold. No sentimentalist, Denton says he changed the formula because he found that page-view incentives encouraged writers to deliver worthless rehashes rather than reporting and tabloid-style scoops — in other words, journalism.

“When we look at the numbers, it’s increasingly evident that the traditional blog post has become a complete commodity,” Denton says. When dueling algorithms compete to answer every human query, it turns out there’s value in telling people things they weren’t aware they didn’t know. To wit: Denton’s technology site Gizmodo recently bought a secret prototype iPhone that an Apple programmer lost in a bar and produced a post featuring pictures and the phone’s specs. Over two weeks, that item racked up nearly 10 million page views, an estimated 4.4 million of them from newcomers, bringing the site an enormous amount of attention (not the least of it from Apple’s lawyers and the police). Denton says his hope is that all the publicity attached to breaking big stories will translate into reader loyalty, brand equity and more lucrative advertising deals.

If that is the model of the future, then the new world could end up looking a lot like the old one, albeit with smaller newsrooms and new players. Politico replaces the Washington correspondent, TMZ is the gossip page and you can get coverage of your baseball team directly from MLB.com, which employs professional sportswriters. In cities like San Diego, New York and Washington, online start-ups are taking on metro news coverage, hoping to tap local ad markets. All of these publications have been hiring real, full-time employees — as have nontraditional providers like Yahoo, which is constructing a new political news site. Over the last few months, there has been a palpable uptick in both advertising and the journalism job market. The iPad, and its applications that restore magazines and newspapers to something like their traditional format, was greeted within the industry like the sight of a ship from a deserted island. [Source]

That everything was broken after the newspaper bubble burst, and now the pieces are coming together in other ways and may find themselves consolidating again in a leaner, more web-centric way is something I feel very strongly about.

Author, blogger and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis begins his Hypercamp on Nov. 11, 2009 at the College University of New York's graduate school of journalism.

Highly localized news and its intersection with profitable, sustainable news is already starting to dominate conversations about the future of news in the United States.

The numbers and business plans, relationships with each other and with legacy news organizations and who will be written into history for leading the movement seemed trending themes of the  New Business Models for (Local) News Hypercamp summit at the modern, sleek and sexy (read: expensive looking) midtown Manhattan home of the College University of New York’s graduate school of journalism.

Held two weeks ago today, the invite-only affair was blasted the world over by way of social media, notably a wildly active Twitter hashtag, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth sharing my experience at the Nov. 11 event.

Outside of the impressive digs and killer eats (breakfast, lunch and open bar with great nibbles to close!), the Hypercamp, a brainchild of Buzzmachine blogger and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis, was unsurprisingly packed with about 150 big name players in the news future conversation, admittedly with an East Coast bias — damn near half the staff of the New York Times and a heavy presence from the Washington Post, Baltimore and New Jersey news outlets (Chris Krewson of the Inquirer, a philly.com executive and humbly Technically Philly held it down for Philadelphia).

The morning was devoted mostly to Jarvis and students showing off updated versions of their New Business Models for News, underwritten by the Knight Foundation and chock full of enough detail, estimation and exploration to be both decidedly important and wildly baseless.

Those numbers focused on for-profit entities of somewhat varying sizes, though many seemed unfulfilled by what was available, including folks interested in nonprofit roles.

“It’s a flag in the ground,” Jarvis said. See his slides here, or watch his morning presentation below, and, yes, see my fat head and Phillies cap on my knee in the bottom left of the screen.

After the morning discussions of these models — and quibbling over the CUNY team’s numbers — and a lunch break, three tracks gave attendees nearly a dozen sessions stuffed with high-profile panelists.

See the full schedule here.

SELLING, WEST COAST VS EAST COAST

Perhaps my favorite session was was on selling for the hyperlocal news site. That afternoon session was hosted by Greg Swanson, a crunchy Portland, Oregon sales executive with Prism, and Mel Taylor, an independent Philadelphia sales consultant with the look, feel and sound of a power seller. It was delightful to see our country’s coastal stereotypes personified so clearly — the aggressive, big East Coast city chap, tall, with perfect hair and a thousand-dollar suit standing beside the more reserved, earth-tone, sweater-wearing father figure.

There wasn’t enough time for either to really finish his presentations fully, but their tempos were set. While I felt both were directing their thoughts far more for established brands launching sites or someone with the chance to launch their product fulltime to start — say, a former newspaper reporter with a severance package to spare — I found value in both.

Swanson left me with two powerful take aways:

• ‘Unique visitors‘ is a broken metric — I already have beef with the unreliability and variables with Web metrics, but Swanson made this bigger still by highlighting just how the cookies-based unique visitor count are always inflated by newspaper dot coms, devaluing monthly page views and wrongly suggesting the loyalty of online readers.
• Localized coupons work — Using the example of Forkfly, Swanson caught the attention of others, by detailing how hyperlocal news sites could recoup business sponsorship support by using social media to push out coupons and other local business deals and bring value.

Taylor’s presentation, the slides from which can be seen below, was challengingly motivational to Swanson’s conversational.

Solid take aways from his truncated speech:

• News has always been about enabling commerce
• Talk in language your local businesses can understand when selling Web metrics
• Sell video commercials on your front page
• Sell 300 x 250 above scroll display ad
• Sell cheaper-sounding weekly rates, rather than monthly figure
• Host an advertiser seminar
  

OTHER PANELS AND CLOSE

Afterward, I dropped in on the Practicing Quality Journalism session, which was mostly just a conversation on new media best practices with innovative staffers from the New York Times, including David Carr. Interesting, but I remain confounded by anyone who seems to think that still notably international newspaper has any real business or precise lessons for bloggers, hyperlocal news sites or even traditional big metro dailies.

I also sat in on a Community Engagement and Marketing panel, hosted by Mary Ann Giodano, editor of New York Times Local news confab, and featuring one of her reporters, David Cohn of Spot.Us and Debbie Galant, the founder of baristanet.com — the kingpin of profitable, hyperlocal news site. I was interested in seeing Giodano, Galant and Cohn, the last of whom I was happy to have finally met in person, but found the subject matter mostly directed at those perhaps in a bit more of the beginning stages of promotion.

The final session was what Jarvis dubbed a ‘reverse panel,’ in which a handful of representatives from big-name news organizations listened to hand-wringing from bloggers about how they might better work together. What came out of it seemed that all agreed they should work together and communication was necessary, but both sides thought the other needed to do a better job of initiating that.

To close the day — before the open bar — Jarvis brought everyone back to CUNY’s newsroom to seek suggestions on what steps should be taken forward, what universities might build and how such events could be done better in the future.

I offered my interest in seeing more research in the world of metrics. I also would have liked to seen more dialogue about how hyperlocal startups — not backed by existing brands — can get from start to the rather optimistic numbers in traffic and profit that Jarvis’s group has estimated.

As this hyperlocal movement takes hold, we need serious education around the idea that more traffic doesn’t always mean more value for advertising, sponsorships and other partnerships.

That education will likely have to happen in a lot of ways, too, if news is to find foothold in profitable sustainability anytime soon.

Tomorrow 2009 begins. Instead of doing a top ten list of posts like most, I want to review the year in important journalism-related blog posts.

There are  a lot of bloggers who focus on journalism. From grizzled veterans, tech geeks and corporate stiffs who are looking for the future, to those who blog the news, and younger cats like me, who have some of the experience, all the enthusiasm and a fresh perspective to offer. Yes, while some have written newspaper obituaries, some are looking toward the future.

So, with all of us running around blabbing on about new media and the future of newspapers, it turns out that every once in a while something I think is pretty meaningful comes to light. This year has been a big one, so below, in my humble opinion, see a guide to 12 months of the best journalism-related blog posts of 2008.

January 2008

• Journalism At The Crossroads: Change Or Die
  On Publishing 2.0 | Jan. 6, 2008
  It may just be largely a collection of posts beginning 2008′s furor on switching the dialogue from convincing to planning for the future of newspapers, but it set the tone for the year. Scott Karp, the founder of journalism news aggregator Publish2 and among the 40-most influential people in publishing, was a good place to begin this year in new media blogging.
• Top ten list of tips for journalism students
  On The Linchpen | Jan. 22, 2008
  This changeover of journalism involves new voices, so I wanted to include voices from college media, which is surprisingly innovating at a similar rate to the professional world. Greg Linch, online editor for the college paper at the University of Miami, is among a bright crop of young 20-something voices adding genuine insight to the dialogue. His tips for other aspiring journalists is a must-read for professors, students and, really, others interested in where newspapers just might be going.
• What the journalism industry can learn from porn
  On 10,000 Words | Jan. 24, 2008
  Mark S. Luckie, an online associate producer for Entertainment Weekly, has one of those blogs that anyone involved in this age of journalism transition should be reading. In this memorable post, he tells us what pornography has to teach. If the details aren’t new, the mention of newspapers needing help from all sides is.

February 2008

• My Last Portfolio Sucked, Yours Might Too
  On Astheria | Feb. 12, 2008
  Turns out lots of people are looking for jobs or just to impress and network with folks (myself included). I stumbled upon this post and thought it offered genuine insight and perspective on how your portfolio looks. Print, Web and graphic designers and photographers can all grab something from this, I think.
• Social Bookmarking For Journalists: 101
  By DigiDave | Feb. 16, 2008
  David Cohn is the young journalist behind Spot.Us, which won the 2008 Knight News Challenge and $340,000 to help innovate news. On his personal blog, he regularly offers a bridge between newsrooms and the Web, none better than this post, helping reporters understand how social bookmarking and other online social networks can help them do their job better.

March 2008

• How I have used the print edition, historically speaking
  On Invisible Inkling | March 20, 2008
  This is likely the simplest of the posts on this list, but no less meaningful. Ryan Sholin, a San Jose State graduate student and an online editor with Gatehouse Media, reviews common uses for newsprint, why normal people pay for a subscription to a newspaper. How do those real reasons translate to an online product?
  

April 2008

• Information ethics
  By Howard Owens | April 14, 2008
  Owens is a big dog at Gatehouse Media online and a regular contributor to the future of newspapers.
• Defining quality in journalism
  On Buzz Machine | April 27, 2008
  Inspired by an e-mail from Norweigians who visited Jeff Jarvis, media consultant and professor at the City University of New York, he gives his thoughts on how quality in journalism will change as new media becomes media. Of course, it comes from a man sometimes criticizing for relishing in the struggles of print media.

May 2008

• Teach yourself
  By Paul Conley | May 7, 2008
  The former corporate-journalism executive responds to questions of how does a veteran go from print journalist to multimedia journalist. This is a must-read for folks looking to do just that.
• 32 of the best real world career and life tips for new journalism graduates entering the newspaper industry
  On Journerdism | May 16, 2008
  The title gives you everything you need to know. So why haven’t you read it?

June 2008

• Do you own trees?
  On Seth Godin’s Blog | June 2, 2008
  He’s a marketer and author but Godin, with more than 30,000 online subscribers, sometimes swings into newspapers. In this post he uses newspapers devotion to print in an increasingly digital world as an example, why let nostalgia or tradition or the past dictate your business decisions, even if they only harm you?

July 2008

• 14 ways newspapers can make more money
  By Sean Blanda | July 21, 2008
  For a time, Sean Blanda was among the best college journalism students blogging. Then he graduated, and nobody cared anymore. OK, well, not exactly so drastic, considering he helped spearhead the national BarCamp NewsInnovation unconference (Are you going to Philadelphia in April to help find the future of newspapers?), but fresh after his graduation from Temple University, young Blanda offers his thoughts on alternative revenue streams for newspapers. With limited professional experience and an outsider’s eye, more than his actual suggestions, I think it’s important for everyone to understand daily newspapers can only survive as brands, as niche publications beat them otherwise.

August 2008

• Are editors a luxury that we can do without?
  On The Guardian | Aug. 18, 2008
  That provocative question came from Jeff Jarvis, of Buzz Machine above, in his media column for the Guardian, a U.K. newspaper. He says reporting is the top priority for a newspaper, so when the cuts come, perhaps editors should be shipped out first. The debate ensued there and on the Buzz Machine.
  

September 2008

• Wednesday was a really fun day at the Las Vegas Sun
  On Internet Punk | Sept. 19, 2008
  Rob Curley’s name gets tossed around sometimes as the best online and multimedia editor in the newspaper business. That’s why it was seen as a bit of a coup when the Las Vegas Sun got him in 2006. So no surprise his average posts hold some weight. Here he talks about some experiences at the Sun one Wednesday, and it feels like insight on the future of newspapers everywhere.

October 2008

• Student news as process
  By Daniel Bachhuber | Oct. 19, 2008
  Daniel is the youngest on this list, and, unlike the other younger folks seen here, I don’t know a lick about him, aside from his role (with Linch, above) pushing to launch CoPress, a college media consulting service. But it’s important to follow what young journalists are saying. The University of Oregon student writes about how a college newspaper might take on an innovated-business model.

November 2008

• Watching the Times struggle (and what you can learn)
  On Seth Godin’s Blog | Nov. 23, 2008
  Another from the marketing guru is another post in which Godin draws broader thoughts from struggling newspapers. After the New York Times announced it would borrow against its headquarters to free up cash, Godin sees a world of lessons to be had. What’s most important to you?

December 2008

• What is…? A handy guide for the new media novice
  On 10,000 Words | Dec. 1, 2008
  Here is a perfect example of evergreen blogging. If you are new to multimedia journalism, then bookmark this post. It’s a shorthand dictionary of everything you need to know.
• Introducing BarCamp NewsInnovation
  We Media | Dec. 2, 2008
  Here’s the post that started a flurry of excitement in recent weeks and is indicative of this year and the future of newspapers. Jason Kristufek wants multimedia-minded individuals to get together and talk about newspapers 2.0, so he did something about it. He started a conversation about hosting an un-conference and helped initiate a few of them across the country, including the national one in Philly (as mentioned above).
• Dear Blogosphere, There’s more to newspapers than The New York Times
  Invisible Inking | Dec. 2, 2008
  Some time after the horrors of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, our country became more obsessed with New York City than it ever was before (that’s for a future post). In this post, Sholin astutely tells the world of online writers that we need to get over the New York Times. Its financial woes, while just as daunting, isn’t representative of the broader conversation. When the money really started to disappear from newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s, a huge divide began to develop between the top tier newspapers of our country – like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal – which retained global news coverage and others – like every other once competing now depleted big urban newspaper – that didn’t. 
  
• The 48 Laws Of Power Applied To Blogging
  The Future Buzz | Dec. 8, 2008
  Adam Singer interestingly takes Robert Greene’s laws of power and applies them to blogging. This just might add something to the conversation for even savvy bloggers, and certainly will add some understanding to those newer to the scene.
• What Happens Next? Some Scenarios
  Recovering Journalist | Dec. 18, 2008
  Mark Potts, a former print journalist and current consultant, is almost two decades removed from a newsroom but can still add to the conversation. In this post he talks generally about what might actually be the future of newspapers once this transition and newspaper bubble is complete.
• Ten questions for journalists in the era of overload
  On Newsless | Dec. 31, 2008
  Update 1/1/09: In the below comment field, Will Sullivan of Journerdism put me on to some great posts by Matt Thompson, former online editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. In this one, Thompson provides a real checklist journalists might read every morning.

-30-

What great journalism posts of 2008 did I miss? Is it yours or someone else’s? I don’t care, but I want to see it. I hope to update this post accordingly.

Digg it here.

From left: Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia; Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina; Representative John Lewis of Georgia; and Representative Artur Davis of Alabama. (Nigel Parry for The New York Times)

Interesting, if already well-circled, story in the recent-most New York Times Magazine, entitled “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?”. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter got some face time in its main graphic, as seen above, and in a large portion of the story, briefly excerpted below. A beginning excerpt that stuck with me:

Obama was barely 2 years old when King gave his famous speech, 3 when Lewis was beaten about the head in Selma. He didn’t grow up in the segregated South as Bill Clinton had. Sharing those experiences wasn’t a prerequisite for gaining the acceptance of black leaders, necessarily, but that didn’t mean Obama, with his nice talk of transcending race and baby-boomer partisanship, could fully appreciate the sacrifices they made, either. “Every kid is always talking about what his parents have been through,” Rangel says, “and no kid has any clue what he’s talking about.”

For black Americans born in the 20th century, the chasms of experience that separate one generation from the next— those who came of age before the movement, those who lived it, those who came along after — have always been hard to traverse. Elijah Cummings, the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and an early Obama supporter, told me a story about watching his father, a South Carolina sharecropper with a fourth-grade education, weep uncontrollably when Cummings was sworn in as a representative in 1996. Afterward, Cummings asked his dad if he had been crying tears of joy. “Oh, you know, I’m happy,” his father replied. “But now I realize, had I been given the opportunity, what I could have been. And I’m about to die.” [Source]

Here is the beginning of reporter Matt Bai‘s lengthy passage on Nutter, later in his piece. Nutter comes off well as always, particularly later in the passage where the most common words in Nutter-stories predictably come up “deadpan” and “dry sense of humor.”

On the first Tuesday in July, I traveled to Philadelphia, the site of Obama’s landmark speech on race, to see the city’s mayor, Michael Nutter. Known as a reformer during a 14-year stint on the City Council, Nutter played a central and intriguing role in this year’s presidential contest, emerging as the black face of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Pennsylvania at a time when she desperately needed — and got — a solid victory in the state. Nutter certainly wasn’t the only visible black politician to campaign for Clinton deep into the primary season, but he was, in some ways, the least likely. Nutter is only four years older than Obama, Ivy League-educated, bookish and doggedly unemotional. He is, in short, the very prototype of the new generation of black political stars. But unlike Cory Booker or Artur Davis or Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, Nutter sided with Clinton, and he enthusiastically campaigned for her.

I was curious to know whether Nutter, who was elected to a four-year term just last fall, was bracing for the consequences of that decision. About 9 of every 10 black voters in Philadelphia pulled the lever for Obama, according to exit polls, and I heard at least one black Obama backer in Washington vow to make Nutter pay for his apostasy. On the day that I visited him at City Hall, his aides had been reviewing the video of a sermon from last fall in which a prominent black minister in the city suggested that Nutter might have a “white agenda.”

Nutter said he sat down with both Clinton and Obama after his election as mayor and quizzed them about urban issues like housing, education and transportation. Race, he said, hadn’t entered into this thinking. He understood, he said, why the prospect of a black president after hundreds of years of discrimination was “powerful stuff” for a lot of his constituents, but he had a greater responsibility, and that was to run the nation’s sixth-largest city. “In the context of what I do for a living, I’ve not figured out a black or white way to fill a pothole,” he said, in a way that made me think he had said this many times before. Nutter was a delegate for Bill Clinton way back in 1992, and he said that the former first lady had shown a “depth of understanding” of what cities like Philadelphia were facing. It probably didn’t hurt that Obama endorsed one of Nutter’s opponents in last year’s mayoral primary, either…

Keep reading on about Nutter here. It’s worth it, Nutter gets a laugh or two. Or read the piece from the beginning here.

A kindergarten class in 1955

Did you want a head-start or a chance to regroup before heading off to kindergarten? That topic is an interesting one that is getting even more complicated with our country’s continued dependence on standardized testing – initially the older the better the scores, so states live it. But there are much larger ramifications, unsurprisingly.

On Friday, Slate writer Emily Blazelon posted a story on the issue:

The calculus goes like this: You look at your 4-year-old, especially if he’s a boy, and consider that his summer or fall birthday (depending on the state and its birthday cutoff) means that he’ll be younger than most of the other kids in his kindergarten class. So you decide to send him a year later. Now he’s at the older end of his class. And you presume that the added maturity will give him an edge from grade to grade. The school may well support your decision. If it’s a private school, they probably have a later birthday cutoff anyway. And if it’s a public school, a principal or kindergarten teacher may suggest that waiting another year before kindergarten is in your kid’s interest despite the official policy. [Source]

Last June, New York Times Magazine had a story on the parental quandary of when to start one’s student in kindergarten.

It included this interesting mention:

A few labor economists do concur with the education scholarship, but most have found that while absolute age (how many days a child has been alive) is not so important, relative age (how old that child is in comparison to his classmates) shapes performance long after those few months of maturity should have ceased to matter. The relative-age effect has been found in schools around the world and also in sports. In one study published in the June 2005 Journal of Sport Sciences, researchers from Leuven, Belgium, and Liverpool, England, found that a disproportionate number of World Cup soccer players are born in January, February and March, meaning they were old relative to peers on youth soccer teams. [Source]

…

[A teacher] used to encourage parents to send their children to kindergarten as soon as they were eligible, but she is now a strong proponent of older kindergartners, after teaching one child with a birthday just a few days before the cutoff. ”She was always a step behind. It wasn’t effort and it wasn’t ability. She worked hard, her mom worked with her and she still was behind.” Andersen followed the girl’s progress through second grade (after that, she moved to a different school) and noticed that she didn’t catch up. Other teachers at Glen Arden Elementary and elsewhere have noticed a similar phenomenon: not always, but too often, the little ones stay behind. [Source]

Makes you think of those poor fools you know who were younger – they were a little slower, weren’t they?

Photo courtesy.

By Christopher Wink | Aug 3, 2007 | New York Times Magazine submission

There has been a great loss in the level of activism among college students since the turbulent 1960s. Complacency reigns over the people. Today’s twenty-something, anarchist-punk, bicycle-messenger population is dwindling. Those that have survived are crestfallen.

The man with the thin gray goatee – and a framed photograph of himself looking hairier and suspiciously uninhibited in 1972 – laments, if only half seriously, that the ire of this young generation cannot seem to be adequately risen.

It was different when he was young, he’ll tell you.

In the 1960s, you weren’t a major city if you didn’t have your own race riot: from Baltimore and D.C. to Watts, to Newark and New York and everywhere else. But it was more than race and it was more than war, the world was changing and college campuses held all the promise the future could hold.

I am one of those young people who the man with the thin gray goatee lectures about social action. For me, Kent State is college basketball. For him, Kent State will always be four dead at the hands of the Ohio National Guard. Time changes more than clocks.

I take classes at Temple University, a school in North Philadelphia known for its diversity and surrounded by a long history of activism. Philadelphia is certainly a major city, so, of course, we, too, had our own 1960s race riot, a charming, two-day affair that resulted in more than 300 injuries and nearly 800 arrests in August of 1964.

The south end of Temple University is marked by Cecil B. Moore Avenue, named for a legendary civil rights lawyer in Philadelphia. Today, at Temple, Cecil B. Moore means a row of residence halls and as far south as many students will walk at night. Before, Cecil B. Moore was who brought the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Philadelphia almost a year to the day after those race riots. Time changes more than clocks.

In the summer of 1965, Moore was in the midst of leading what would be an 8-month picket of Girard College, a private, then-segregated school for underprivileged, orphan boys. When King showed up on a hot day in August, he addressed 3,000 demonstrators massed outside the school, leaning into a microphone on an improvised stage that used Founder’s Hall, the finest 160-year-old example of Greek revival architecture in the country, as a backdrop.

“It is a sad experience to stand at this wall in the 20th century in Philadelphia, the cradle of liberty,” he orated as King was known to orate. “It is a kind of Berlin Wall to keep the colored children of God out.”

Time tells that three years later, after state and federal court appeals, that that racial wall finally fell and the first black students were admitted. Things like that were happening everywhere in the country, everywhere in the world, the man with the thin gray goatee adds proudly, as if he really believes that back then one man with long hair and good music could change the world. No one believes that anymore. Time changes more than clocks.

They were times of excitement and confusion and fear. My own grandfather was moved enough to keep a .22 caliber rifle underneath the bed of his Long Island home, which was nestled, in his mind, uncomfortably between New York City to the west and established black communities to the east.

Why don’t the children of today terrify middle-aged suburbanites into gun ownership?

My generation has had our moments, but they are few, far in between, and seemingly less constructive than those of the past. Fifteen years ago, more than fifty died in the chaos following the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. Even more recently, Ohio has seen two well-publicized movements, one following a 2001 police shooting in Cincinnati and a 2005 reaction to a neo-Nazi rally in Toledo.

My own North Philadelphia campus has seen social action during my lifetime. Two years before ‘Rodney King’ became a household name, a brawl of some 600 students turned into days of protests on North Broad Street, as students demonstrated against what they felt were racially-charged, overly-aggressive tactics by university police.

What about that? I ask the man with the thin gray goatee. Those demonstrations might be more emblematic of our generational differences than anything, he counters as a father would counter a child too young to know anything.

It was fought and, by some standards, won, as Temple incorporated race courses into the university’s core curriculum, but, unlike the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, there wasn’t staying power. Walk around Temple’s campus today and it would be unlikely to find anyone who remembers campus rioting as recent as 1990.

The man with thin gray goatee is right. That breed of social action isn’t my generation’s specialty.

My peers and I have forgotten the great struggles of the past, we are without Kennedys and Kings, and we aren’t nearly as organized. The man with the thin gray goatee thinks that that means social action is dead, but I think he’s wrong.

Young people today are just doing things differently. Rather than staging a sit-in to encourage Gerald Ford to bring troops back from Vietnam, young people today are more likely to tutor someone younger or shovel the driveway of someone older.

A recent survey of college freshmen suggested the highest interest in volunteerism in decades. In the survey, sponsored by the University of Maryland’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement and conducted in the spring of 2006, more than one in three people interviewed had volunteered that year.

Like the 1960s and 1970s, these changes are happening on campuses first. The number of collegiate volunteers blossomed by more than 20 percent between 2002 and 2005, an additional 600,000 young do-gooders, according to the Corporation for National & Community Service, a federal agency.

Young people of the future won’t interact with their surrounding world the same as today, just as today’s youth don’t do it as those of the past did. Campuses are no longer hotbeds of dissension and civil disobedience, but now they congregate social work en masse like never before. It is now, as it has always been, about young people trying to find meaning in this world.

In October of 1967, King was back, speaking to students at Barratt Middle School in South Philadelphia , just six months before a sniper’s bullet left him dead in Memphis.

“If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures,” King said. “Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

It’s silly to condemn a generation. I’m not convinced that those my age have missed their calling already, that my peers and I will be remembered for not having swept what needs to be swept.

Energy isn’t lost, maybe diverted, but, even still, such complaints sound like hollow shouts at the moon for not being full. The man with the thin goatee likes that one, he says. It’s something he’d expect from one of his contemporaries, said back when indifference was un-cool, the world was pocket-sized and everybody cared. Don’t hear things like that anymore.

As submitted to the New York Times Magazine College Essay Contest. See it here.