Winter 2019
Reporting from the hard path
Los Angeles Times reporter Andrea Castillo, a 2012 Washington State University alumna, reports on refugees and immigrants to document history as it unfolds. » More ...
Journalism
Spring 2018
At Home with Ernie Pyle
Edited by Owen V. Johnson ’68
Indiana University Press: 2016
A glimpse into the life and times of American journalist and Indiana favorite son Ernie Pyle, as seen through an extensive collection of Pyle’s folksy newspaper columns stretching from his student days in 1921 until his death by sniper fire during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.
The homespun Hoosier, as Pyle was known, grew up in small-town … » More …
Spring 2018
Fact or Fiction? Using the Web to Quickly Fact-check Social Media Feeds
Although titled Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, Michael Caulfield’s book is in fact for all of us. That’s why he subtitled the book as also being for “other people who care about facts.” As he writes, the web “is both the largest propaganda machine ever created and the most amazing fact-checking tool ever invented.”
Most efforts at teaching web literacy have focused, the Washington State University staff member writes, on time-consuming critical thinking and on producing and publishing things on the web. While both are valuable skills, they fail to address the much more urgent need: how to evaluate the information we are presented with … » More …
Summer 2017
Robowriters
Subject. Verb. Object.
These are the basic building blocks of written communication. It’s what you need to make a complete sentence like the one you’re reading now.
Structured. Logical. Direct.
This also is why parts of my chosen career are ripe for takeover by robots.
For millions of Americans, the defining realization of how fast artificial intelligence is evolving came in 2011 when Watson — IBM’s now-celebrated language processing computer — won the popular TV quiz show Jeopardy by beating two of the game’s top champions.
I watched with fascination as well. But, for me, the point was driven home even harder a few years … » More …
Spring 2017
Writing pools, movie stars
The New York Yankees were establishing their dominance over America’s favorite pastime. The Golden Era of Hollywood was in full swing. And a nation recovering from the sacrifices of World War II had begun to heal and find itself.
It was a world of big cars and even bigger personalities. A world that sportswriter John D. McCallum, a U.S. Army veteran and former pro baseball player, found he could navigate with surprising ease.
McCallum resumed his English and journalism studies at Washington State after returning from the war, and briefly played for the Portland Beavers in 1947. But it was after he hung up his … » More …
Winter 2012
Chris Dunagan ’74, ’75—Bearing witness to the sights and smells of our soggy backyard
If you cover the waterfront the way Chris Dunagan does, you have to expect a fair amount of smells. There’s the fresh, tangy scent of estuary and the mild musk of beach wrack. There’s the stench of rotting shellfish during the great Oyster Rescue of 2010, and the outsized rot of a beached gray whale. Dunagan, 60, has documented a lot of beached whales, although the numbers are hard to nail down.
Counting just grays, not killer whales or humpbacks or dead whale reports over the phone, he says, “I’ve probably gone out to 20.”
Dunagan (biochemistry ’74, ’75 communications) has been the environmental reporter … » More …
Summer 2012
The learned observer
“We should observe first, and think afterwards.”
—The Lancet, Oct. 19, 1823
Part of the nature of a writer—but then again, perhaps I speak only for myself—is the constant reimagining of one’s self and context, the repeated immersion in myriad and esoteric subjects, all the while desperately hoping for infinite reincarnations in order to fulfill all the things one would like to understand, experience, and be. On the other hand, being a writer embraces the perfectly paradoxical satisfaction with one’s role as a learned observer.
Given the skeptical writer’s reluctance to rely on reincarnation, the only way to grasp these multitudinous desires and perspectives … » More …
Video: Excerpt of The Murrow Interview with Ayman Mohlyedin of Al Jazeera English
In March 2011, founding dean of WSU’s Murrow College of Communication Lawrence Pintak interviewed Ayman Mohlyedin, correspondent for Al Jazeera English, on Northwest Public Television‘s The Murrow Interview. Watch an excerpt of the interview below.
You can read more about Mohlyedin and other journalists in the Arab world in “Revolutions are televised by Arab journalists.”
3 minutes, 26 seconds
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Summer 2011
Revolutions are televised by Arab journalists
The world watched people rise up this year against dictators and authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and northern Africa, their protests aired by satellite television and the Internet. In Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, and other countries, journalists televised, twittered, and spread the “electronic virus,” as Lawrence Pintak calls the media revolution, around the Arab world.
Pintak, founding dean of the Murrow College of Communication and a former Middle East correspondent for CBS, says satellite TV plays the critical role in the protests. Eighty percent of the Arab world gets its news from television, and international news in Arabic, produced by Arabs, displays the … » More …
Fall 2003
The first casualty
Vietnam was the last conflict in which reporters could speak and write with prudent freedom.
During one of the nation’s many wars, I wrote of a patrol that came under fire and killed an enemy soldier. Before continuing, the GIs cut off the dead man’s genitals, and forced them into his mouth, leaving also a playing card-Ace of Spades-on his body. The soldiers said that such were enemy superstitions, that they would not cross over a dead man so festooned, thus it was required to keep the other side effectively tethered if the patrol was to complete its mission.
It was a poor excuse for … » More …