Jay Rosen

NoContest Communications readers know all about Jay Rosen, the marvellous analyst of media and journalism who recently retired from his position as Professor at NYU. His new gig is working to promote News Creators Corps. He writes:

For the last three decades, I have been trying to improve American journalism by making the profession of it easier to trust. But now I have to recognize another way. The rise of the creator class and its use of the social layer makes it clear: Journalism — the practice of it — belongs not only to the people who call themselves journalists, but to everyone who does civic work with its tools.

As we’re learning every day: that’s a lot of people. …

Audiences are migrating to the content creators, whose work is easier to trust, more fun to consume, and (often, not always) better at explaining what just happened. The simple principle of sharing good information — and watching out for the bad — has to migrate with it.  

This is what he is trying to do:

News Creator Corps thought I could help. Help us explain what we’re doing, they said. Help us raise money to do it.  So that’s my new gig, and probably my last project.

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Small changes here

I’ve replaced the feed for “Kwantlen Polytechnic University” with one for “University Canada West” to reflect my new academic home. Gone is the feed for “Education and AI” because it’s already impossible to avoid utter immersion in this topic. And I’ve also taken down the feed for “Universal Design for Learning” because this is no longer a focus of mine.

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Devotion

Zach Helfand’s article describing the history and sensibility of The New Yorker‘s famous fact-checking department is hilarious – and, to me, enthralling – from top to bottom.

“I find that often a fact checker forces you to tie a knot in the sentence unnecessarily,” David Sedaris told me. One of his essays describes a trip to a small-town Costco, where he bought “a gross of condoms.” The checker said that, actually, he hadn’t: Costco doesn’t sell a gross, which is a hundred and forty-four. “So I made it ‘a mess’ of condoms, which just made them sound used,” he said. “If the essay was about how many condoms Costco sells, definitely, have the exact number. But this was about my experience being gay in a small Southern town. Can you let me have this?” Humorists can infuriate the checkers, who recognize that even funny nonfiction has to be completely real; it’s held to the same standard as anything else. Last year, Jane Bua checked a Sedaris essay about meeting the Pope. She checked a detail about the color of the buttons on a cardinal’s cassock so assiduously (the department’s perception), or maddeningly (Sedaris’s), that he e-mailed his editor, “Can you slip her a sedative?” Sedaris has complained, “Checking is like being fucked in the ass by a hot thermos.” Bua mentioned this to the checker on Sedaris’s next piece, Yinuo Shi. Shi considered the analogy and said, “If a thermos works, the outside wouldn’t be hot.”

I have always regarded this magazine’s fact-checking department as a working orgy where young editors are relieved of any restraint in their pursuit of what’s so really real it can be printed on paper.

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Avoid unnecessary fates

Our website’s founding friend Chet Wisniewski has a new podcast: “Security. Take. Two. Real. Serious. Security.” Chet with his colleague Ben Verschaeren revisit notable IT security calamities with profound and lively stories – “once the truth is known, discovering lessons that can be applied to avoid a similar fate.” I have not met Ben, but I know Chet well, and have seen him speaking – he is charming and amazing. I have very much enjoyed these!

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Mind = Soul

Reading is a form of controlled hallucination. AI sidesteps one of the most wonderful miracles of the mind.

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Sure Why Not

God.

The agency said that if a house of worship endorsed a candidate to its congregants, the I.R.S. would view that not as campaigning but as a private matter, like “a family discussion concerning candidates.”

(The title is a fine trope from Atrios.)

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Almost time to go

Kwantlen Polytechnic University has been at or near the centre of my life for more than two decades. We’ll keep the newsfeed here up into my retirement years, though.

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Bryan Garner’s “Tip of the Day”

You really must subscribe. Today’s was delightfully humbling:

racket; racquet. For the implement used in net games, racket is standard in American English and British English alike. The variant racquet appears in some proper names (e.g., the Palm Springs Racquet Club) seemingly because the “fancy” spelling looks more high-toned. But racquetball and racketball are two different sports. Racquetball is a U.S. sport that is played on an indoor or outdoor court with short paddles and a hollow rubber ball. Racketball is a form of squash played mostly in England. The racket, ball, court, and scoring all differ from American racquetball. In 2016, the World Squash Federation rebranded racketball as “Squash 57.”

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Welcome them in.

In a piece for The Conversation Canada, my Kwantlen Polytechnic University colleague Jeffrey Meyers writes about Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder, two eminent American scholars who fled Yale University and the United States, taking positions at the University of Toronto, to escape the authoritarian impulses Trump’s administration has brought to American universities.

Stanley’s father, a German Jew who fled Germany for America in 1939, carries the remembrance of fascism. Both Stanley and Snyder explore the similarities between what is occurring in Trump’s America, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and, equally chillingly, between Trump’s America and Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Even prior to the first Trump presidency, Stanley already asked in his 2015 book, How Propoganda Works, whether the U.S., “the world’s oldest liberal democracy,” might already have become a liberal democracy “in name only?” …

As a Canadian, I would like to say America’s loss is our gain, and I wish these scholars well. I am also aware that narratives of flight to Canada as refuge have historically bolstered national myths while obscuring Canadian inequities. My hope is that Canadians will not observe the arrival of U.S. scholars with smugness, but instead with shared concern.

Too much cynicism might prevent us from acknowledging the importance of these … scholars’ decisions to leave their country and come to ours at this particular time in history. However, my hope is also that we are also inspired by their considerable truth-telling skills to demand Canada also do better.

I agree with each of these points. I would add that while several nations seem to be courting scholars and professors who seek and/or need to leave the United States, Canada has yet to do so in any public way that I have seen.

May 27: We can get some wonderful students up here, too, now that the Trump administration “has ordered US embassies worldwide to immediately stop scheduling visa interviews for foreign students as it prepares to implement comprehensive social media screening for all international applicants.”

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Pope Francis

“When people ask for a blessing, an exhaustive moral analysis should not be placed as a precondition for conferring it. For those seeking a blessing should not be required to have prior moral perfection.”

“A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.”

“Right now we don’t have a very good relation with Creation.”

I am sad today, though heartened by this man’s words and example. RIP.

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