The number one British album today in 1969 was the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed”:
The number one British single today in 1980 came 12 days after its singer’s death:
The number one song today in 1986:
The number one album today in 1975 for the second consecutive week was “Chicago IX,” which was actually “Chicago’s Greatest Hits”:
Dan Calabrese and other conservative websites pick up on a WisPolitics report on a subject this very blog reported on four months ago:
Gov. Scott Walker said Monday his administration’s ongoing discussion about taxes includes a look at whether it would be feasible to eliminate the income tax.
Walker said the conversation is starting now so his administration can take time well ahead of the next budget to figure out what employers, small business owners and the public believes “would be the biggest bang for the buck.”
“There are many states that do very well, better than most states in the country, that have no income taxes,” Walker told reporters during a stop at his Northern Economic Development Summit. “That’s one thing for us to look at. Is that feasible? What would that mean in terms of an economic boost? That’s not only for individuals, but small businesses in this state.”
Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and Revenue Secretary Rick Chandler last week had the first of their roundtable discussions on taxes. Chandler said Monday those discussions are to get input from the public on what they’re interested in as well as what’s best for job creation. He said that could be changes to the income tax code or property taxes.
“We want to look at areas where we may not stack up well against other states, where particular aspects of our tax code may be out of line with other states,” Chandler said. “We want to get the overall burden down, and we want to make all elements of the tax code as competitive as possible.”
Where does Wisconsin “not stack up well against other states” in taxes? Basically all of them, but particularly in income taxes, because our state’s culture hates “rich” people. The purpose of a tax system should be to raise necessary revenue for the functions of government, not for any other purpose, including “fairness.” A system where everyone pays the same tax rate is “fair” because people with more income or who spend more pay more in, respectively, income and sales taxes.
Calabrese adds:
While John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are firing shots at conservative organizations for criticizing the latest GOP punt on fiscal policy, let’s see what’s happening in statehouses across the country – particularly in Paul Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin.
Scott Walker, who already went to war with public employee unions and won concerning collective bargaining rights, isn’t resting on his laurels. He’s now taking a serious look at eliminating Wisconsin’s state income tax – a move that would put Wisconsin on a par with economic strongholds like Texas and Florida. The conversation is beginning well in advance of the next budget cycle because Walker wants to have a clear sense of the fiscal and economic implications before he brings the idea before the Legislature. …
Democrats like income taxes, of course, because they can be used very efficiently as instruments of redistribution. Walker isn’t yet saying how he would otherwise restructure the state’s tax code to compensate for the loss of income tax revenue (assuming he would at all), but one obvious step would be an expansion of the state sales tax. Sales taxes, of course, are less prone to politicians’ manipulation, which is why Democrats don’t much like them. You can exempt certain things – like groceries and medicine – but you can’t build in the same myriad of complications that are possible with an income tax.
And of course, the best argument against income taxes is that they serve as a disincentive against earning, whereas sales taxes encourage savings and discourage consumption. That’s a dagger in the heart of Keynesians who think consumption alone drives economic growth. They prefer to impose punitive income taxes on the rich and redistribute the income to those who earn less on the theory that they will spend the money on their needs and all this consumption will drive growth. That’s why they’re demand-siders, because they think demand leading to consumption creates wealth. We’re supply-siders because we believe production adds value and creates wealth, thus making it possible for people to consume what represents value to them.
Actually, Walker is inflating this trial balloon because, well before the next budget cycle, he has a(nother) reelection. Assuming Walker survives the old and new threats on his life before the 2014 election, I’m skeptical about this, as I wrote four months ago, for a variety of reasons, beginning with arithmetic. In order to make up the loss of income tax revenue, some combination of three things will have to happen:
Do you see support among the average Wisconsinite for any of those three, let alone all of those three? Democrats demagogue every tax cut and every spending cut because they believe people don’t pay enough in taxes, and that government doesn’t spend enough money in this state. Too many Wisconsinites persist in the mistaken belief that our government services, including our schools, are great values, when they’re not, in either what we’re paying for them or their quality.
The comments on the Cain TV blog and on Facebook (as in 12,041 Likes on Cain’s site alone) indicate overwhelming support for getting rid of income taxes. Some comments may indicate less than fully thought out support of getting rid of income taxes. (Such as the political likelihood of whacking one-third of state government spending.) Others prove that other states have considerably lower taxes and much less government and provide services to their citizens just fine.
I find it unlikely that income taxes will die in Wisconsin. I am most interested to find out what Walker’s tax reform proposal will contain. What it must contain beyond tax cuts is constitutional, not merely statutory, limits on spending and constitutionally required voter or supermajority approval of tax increases. Never trust politicians to do the right thing; you have to prevent them from doing the wrong thing.
The New York Times’ David Brooks:
The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for those not invited. Month after month, he gets to be a discussion facilitator at think tank dinners where guests talk about what it’s like to live in poverty while the wait staff glides through the room thinking bitter thoughts.
He doesn’t have students, but he does have clients. He doesn’t have dark nights of the soul, but his eyes blaze at the echo of the words “breakout session.”
Many people wonder how they too can become Thought Leaders and what the life cycle of one looks like.
In fact, the calling usually starts young. As a college student, the future Thought Leader is bathed in attention. His college application essay, “I Went to Panama to Teach the Natives About Math but They Ended Up Teaching Me About Life,” is widely praised by guidance counselors. On campus he finds himself enmeshed in a new social contract: Young people provide their middle-aged professors with optimism and flattery, and the professors provide them with grade inflation. He is widely recognized for his concern for humanity. (He spends spring break unicycling across Thailand while reading to lepers.)
Not armed with fascinating ideas but with the desire to have some, he launches off into the great struggle for attention. At first his prose is upbeat and smarmy, with a peppy faux sincerity associated with professional cheerleading.
Within a few years, though, his mood has shifted from smarm to snark. There is no writer so obscure as a 26-year-old writer. So he is suddenly consumed by ambition anxiety — the desperate need to prove that he is superior in sensibility to people who are superior to him in status. Soon he will be writing blog posts marked by coruscating contempt for extremely anodyne people: “Kelly Clarkson: Satan or Merely His Spawn?”
Of course the writer in this unjustly obscure phase will develop the rabid art of being condescending from below. Of course he will confuse his verbal dexterity for moral superiority. Of course he will seek to establish his edgy in-group identity by trying to prove that he was never really that into Macklemore.
Fortunately, this snarky phase doesn’t last. By his late 20s, he has taken a job he detests in a consulting firm, offering his colleagues strategy memos and sexual tension. By his early 30s, his soul has been so thoroughly crushed he’s incapable of thinking outside of consultantese. It’s not clear our Thought Leader started out believing he would write a book on the productivity gains made possible by improved electronic medical records, but having written such a book he can now travel from medical conference to medical conference making presentations and enjoying the rewards of being T.S.A. Pre. …
The middle-aged Thought Leader’s life has hit equilibrium, composed of work, children and Bikram yoga. The desire to be snarky mysteriously vanishes with the birth of the first child. His prose has never been so lacking in irony and affect, just the clean translucence of selling out.
He’s succeeding. Unfortunately, the happy moment when you are getting just the right amount of attention passes, and you don’t realize you were in this moment until after it is gone.
The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity. By his late 50s, the Thought Leader is a lion of his industry, but he is bruised by snarky comments from new versions of his formerly jerkish self. Of course, this is when he utters his cries for civility and good manners, which are really just pleas for mercy to spare his tender spots.
OK, I’ve changed my mind about the headline. (Meanwhile, read the comments, which are literally all over the place.)
The biggest thing that happened today wasn’t in music, it was in movies, today in 1968:
The number one British single today in 1958:
Today in 1961, Elvis Presley got a dubious Christmas gift in the mail — his draft notice:
Had George W. Bush not won the 2000 election (that is, the only way presidential elections count, in the Electoral College), this would have been our president (from The Gateway Pundit):
FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY [Dec. 13]—
Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap would be completely ice free in five years. Gore made the prediction to a German audience in 2008. He told them that “the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in 5 years.”
This wasn’t the only time Gore made his ice-free prediction. Gore’s been predicting this since 2007. That means that this year the North Pole should be completely melted by now.
And now, the facts from Mike Smith:
Record cold (including the coldest temperature ever recorded on earth a few days ago), above average early season snows and — yes, Arctic ice back into normal (the blue line back within the gray tinting below) —
record harvests, fewer than normal tornadoes, fewer than normal hurricanes, and a record interval since the U.S. has experienced a major hurricane. Most of all, temperatures haven’t risen for 15 years. What’s not to like?!
Breitbart adds:
Polar sea ice increased 50% over last year, growing from 6,000 to 9,000 cubic kilometers when compared to the same period in 2012. Moreover, this year’s multi-year ice is 30 cm thicker than last year, and scientists claim that thick, multi-year ice indicates healthy Arctic sea-ice cover.
The results were revealed by the European Space Agency (ESA) CryoSat satellite mission. The CryoSat-2 was launched in April 2010 and is designed to measure sea-ice thickness across the entire Arctic Ocean. The satellite’s findings indicate that the volume of Arctic sea ice has increased substantially.
These findings prove to be at odds with Al Gore’s predictions back in 2009 when he spoke at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Gore stated that computer models reflect “that there is a 75% chance that the entire north polarized cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice free during the next 5-7 years.”
Past satellite missions showed a decline in Arctic Ocean ice over the last few decades. However, the actual volume of sea ice has proven difficult to determine because it moves around, so its thickness can change. The CryoSat-2 satellite has provided Scientists with information that, for the first time, allows them to accurately measure ice thickness.
The converse (not opposite) of Gore is, according to Smith, this:
Dr. Roberts was the founder of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) which is leading the charge against global warming. The paragraph below could have been written by NCAR’s scientists today:
But, Dr. Roberts was more correct than his contemporaries in 2013, cold weather is far worse for humanity than warm weather. Dr. Roberts’ article in its entirety is here.
What this means is that the “science” of weather prediction is science only in the sense of the study of climate to try to predict it. Gore, of course, is motivated only by his desire to illegitimately exercise power over people, while making millions of dollars as part of the humans-cause-climate-change crowd.
The inconvenient larger truth is that the Earth is not as fragile as people think it is, because man cannot possibly compare to Mother Nature’s destructive abilities. Walter Williams observes:
The 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, in present-day Indonesia, had the force of 200 megatons of TNT. That’s the equivalent of 13,300 15-kiloton atomic bombs, the kind that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
Preceding that eruption was the 1815 Tambora eruption, also in present-day Indonesia, which holds the record as the largest known volcanic eruption. It spewed so much debris into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, that 1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer” or “Summer That Never Was.”
It led to crop failures and livestock death in much of the Northern Hemisphere and caused the worst famine of the 19th century. An A.D. 535 Krakatoa eruption had such force that it blotted out much of the light and heat of the sun for 18 months and is said to have led to the Dark Ages.
Geophysicists estimate that just three volcanic eruptions, Indonesia (1883), Alaska (1912) and Iceland (1947), spewed more carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than all of mankind’s activities in our entire history.
How has our fragile Earth handled floods? China is probably the world capital of gigantic floods. The 1887 Yellow River flood cost between 900,000 and 2 million lives. China’s 1931 flood was worse, yielding an estimated death toll between 1 million and 4 million.
But China doesn’t have a monopoly on floods. Between 1219 and 1530, the Netherlands experienced floods costing about 250,000 lives.
What about the impact of earthquakes on our fragile Earth? There’s Chile’s 1960 Valdivia earthquake, coming in at 9.5 on the Richter scale, a force equivalent to 1,000 atomic bombs going off at the same time.
The deadly 1556 earthquake in China’s Shaanxi Province devastated an area of 520 miles. There’s the more recent December 2004 magnitude 9.1 earthquake in the Indian Ocean that caused the deadly Boxing Day tsunami, and a deadly March 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck eastern Japan.
Our fragile Earth faces outer-space terror. Two billion years ago, an asteroid hit Earth, creating the Vredefort crater in South Africa. It has a radius of 118 miles, making it the world’s largest impact crater.
In Ontario, Canada, there’s the Sudbury Basin, resulting from a meteor strike 1.8 billion years ago, which has an 81-mile diameter, making it the second-largest impact structure on Earth. Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay crater is a bit smaller, about 53 miles wide. Then there’s the famous but puny Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is not even a mile wide.
I’ve pointed out only a tiny portion of the cataclysmic events that have struck the Earth — ignoring whole categories, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning strikes, fires, blizzards, landslides and avalanches. Despite these cataclysmic events, the Earth survived.
My question is: Which of these powers of nature can be matched by mankind? For example, can mankind duplicate the polluting effects of the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption or the asteroid impact that wiped out dinosaurs? It is the height of arrogance to think that mankind can make significant parametric changes in the Earth or can match nature’s destructive forces.
(By the way: Gore reportedly has become a vegan, as has his former boss, Bill Clinton. So eat meat.)
As you know, I considered running for president.
Facebook Friend Bill Sitter, unimpressed with that, proposes his own dream ticket:
According to many recent newspaper articles, the dream Republican ticket for 2016 is Chris Christie and Susana Martinez, Both of those candidates come from blue states. Both of candidates come from law enforcement backgrounds and are moderate in policy. They however are tough as nails in tone. Susanna Martinez comes from the Southwest and Chris Christie comes the Northeast. One of the states is very urban and the other rural. Both areas recently have become more difficult for Republicans to compete in.
Looking first at Susana Martinez, she is a former prosecutor in New Mexico and daughter of a security business owner.She has a good record of success. She won a DA race in a county that is predominantly Democrat and her tireless fight for justice has lead to some rule changes. One example is the expansion of Katie’s Law. In fact, Katie’s Law is named after Katie Sepich, a 22-year old college student whose killer Martinez prosecuted and convicted. As District Attorney, Martinez fought hard to pass the legislation, which required a DNA sample to be taken from anyone arrested for a violent felony in New Mexico. After taking office as governor, she made it a top priority to expand Katie’s Law to require a DNA sample for all felony arrests. The expansion passed through the legislature with large bi-partisan support and was signed into law by Governor Martinez in April 2011.
After being a successful District Attorney , She ran for governor of New Mexico and won. 54% to 46%. She has since maintained a very high approval rating among her citizens. She has a 70% approval rating among all people in New Mexico, which includes support from 44% of Democrats and 64% of independents. This proves that she is doing well with the Latino because a significant portion off the population in that state. …
Overall she helps complement Christie in a lot of ways. She backs up the law enforcement appeal. Being a woman and Latino bring those voters to the forefront. She also is willing to work across the aisle for conservative solutions. Thus she is in many ways the female version of Christie. …
Now let us to turn to Chris Christie, the current Governor of New Jersey. He comes from Morris, New Jersey and is a former United States Attorney. He started his assent, when he defeated Jon Corizine in 2009 Governor’s race. Chris Christie has the fighter personality that people of political stripes recognize and admire. …
This willingness to work across the aisle has allowed Chris Christie to achieve sky high approval ratings much like Susana Martinez has. According to a recent poll prior to his reelection effort, his approval rating was at 74%. Two particular data points in the poll were quite striking. The first being that “Democrats approve of the Republican governor 56 – 38 percent and say 48 – 43 percent he deserves reelection”. The second one being that, “an early look at the 2016 presidential election, New Jersey voters go 49 percent for Hillary Clinton and 45 percent for Christie. Clinton leads 60 – 34 percent among women while Christie leads 58 – 35 percent among men. He leads 90 – 7 percent among Republicans and gets 48 percent of independent voters to Clinton’s 44 percent. Democrats go to Clinton 86 – 8 percent.”
The GOP ticket undoubtedly needs at least one governor on it, preferably on the top spot. The last five years should prove in spades why that is. Two candidates with experience in Congress instead of executive experience have produced executive incompetence with malignant relations with Congress.
There are those who claim Christie is too liberal to be a GOP presidential candidate. That’s up to the GOP voter. Keep in mind, though, that governors have to get something accomplished, which makes them better potential presidents than someone like Barack “Present” Obama. GOP voters leery of Christie also forget the role of Congress in proposing legislation, which you’d think should have become crystal clear during the Obama (mis)administration.
We begin with an entry from Great Business Decisions in Rock Music History: Today in 1961, EMI Records decided it wasn’t interested in signing the Beatles to a contract.
The number one single over here today in 1961:
Today in 1966, a friend of Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, Tara Browne, was killed when his Lotus Elan crashed into a parked truck. John Lennon used Browne’s death as motivation for “A Day in the Life”:
The number one album today in 1971 was Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Going On”:
Happiness has traditionally been considered an elusive and evanescent thing. To some, even trying to achieve it is an exercise in futility. It has been said that “happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
Social scientists have caught the butterfly. After 40 years of research, they attribute happiness to three major sources: genes, events and values. Armed with this knowledge and a few simple rules, we can improve our lives and the lives of those around us. We can even construct a system that fulfills our founders’ promises and empowers all Americans to pursue happiness. …
For many years, researchers found that women were happier than men, although recent studies contend that the gap has narrowed or may even have been reversed. Political junkies might be interested to learn that conservative women are particularly blissful: about 40 percent say they are very happy. That makes them slightly happier than conservative men and significantly happier than liberal women. The unhappiest of all are liberal men; only about a fifth consider themselves very happy.
But even demographically identical people vary in their happiness. What explains this?
The first answer involves our genes. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have tracked identical twins who were separated as infants and raised by separate families. As genetic carbon copies brought up in different environments, these twins are a social scientist’s dream, helping us disentangle nature from nurture. These researchers found that we inherit a surprising proportion of our happiness at any given moment — around 48 percent. (Since I discovered this, I’ve been blaming my parents for my bad moods.)
If about half of our happiness is hard-wired in our genes, what about the other half? It’s tempting to assume that one-time events — like getting a dream job or an Ivy League acceptance letter — will permanently bring the happiness we seek. And studies suggest that isolated events do control a big fraction of our happiness — up to 40 percent at any given time.
But while one-off events do govern a fair amount of our happiness, each event’s impact proves remarkably short-lived. People assume that major changes like moving to California or getting a big raise will make them permanently better off. They won’t. Huge goals may take years of hard work to meet, and the striving itself may be worthwhile, but the happiness they create dissipates after just a few months.
So don’t bet your well-being on big one-off events. The big brass ring is not the secret to lasting happiness. …
The first three are fairly uncontroversial. Empirical evidence that faith, family and friendships increase happiness and meaning is hardly shocking. Few dying patients regret overinvesting in rich family lives, community ties and spiritual journeys.
Work, though, seems less intuitive. Popular culture insists our jobs are drudgery, and one survey recently made headlines by reporting that fewer than a third of American workers felt engaged; that is praised, encouraged, cared for and several other gauges seemingly aimed at measuring how transcendently fulfilled one is at work.
Those criteria are too high for most marriages, let alone jobs. What if we ask something simpler: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your job?” This simpler approach is more revealing because respondents apply their own standards. This is what the General Social Survey asks, and the results may surprise. More than 50 percent of Americans say they are “completely satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their work. This rises to over 80 percent when we include “fairly satisfied.” This finding generally holds across income and education levels.
This shouldn’t shock us. Vocation is central to the American ideal, the root of the aphorism that we “live to work” while others “work to live.” Throughout our history, America’s flexible labor markets and dynamic society have given its citizens a unique say over our work — and made our work uniquely relevant to our happiness. When Frederick Douglass rhapsodized about “patient, enduring, honest, unremitting and indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put,” he struck the bedrock of our culture and character. …
Along the way, I learned that rewarding work is unbelievably important, and this is emphatically not about money. That’s what research suggests as well. Economists find that money makes truly poor people happier insofar as it relieves pressure from everyday life — getting enough to eat, having a place to live, taking your kid to the doctor. But scholars like the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman have found that once people reach a little beyond the average middle-class income level, even big financial gains don’t yield much, if any, increases in happiness.
So relieving poverty brings big happiness, but income, per se, does not. Even after accounting for government transfers that support personal finances, unemployment proves catastrophic for happiness. Abstracted from money, joblessness seems to increase the rates of divorce and suicide, and the severity of disease.
And according to the General Social Survey, nearly three-quarters of Americans wouldn’t quit their jobs even if a financial windfall enabled them to live in luxury for the rest of their lives. Those with the least education, the lowest incomes and the least prestigious jobs were actually most likely to say they would keep working, while elites were more likely to say they would take the money and run. We would do well to remember this before scoffing at “dead-end jobs.”
Assemble these clues and your brain will conclude what your heart already knew: Work can bring happiness by marrying our passions to our skills, empowering us to create value in our lives and in the lives of others. Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”
In other words, the secret to happiness through work is earned success.
This is not conjecture; it is driven by the data. Americans who feel they are successful at work are twice as likely to say they are very happy overall as people who don’t feel that way. And these differences persist after controlling for income and other demographics.
You can measure your earned success in any currency you choose. You can count it in dollars, sure — or in kids taught to read, habitats protected or souls saved. When I taught graduate students, I noticed that social entrepreneurs who pursued nonprofit careers were some of my happiest graduates. They made less money than many of their classmates, but were no less certain that they were earning their success. They defined that success in nonmonetary terms and delighted in it.
If you can discern your own project and discover the true currency you value, you’ll be earning your success. You will have found the secret to happiness through your work.
There’s nothing new about earned success. It’s simply another way of explaining what America’s founders meant when they proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that humans’ inalienable rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. …
There’s nothing new about earned success. It’s simply another way of explaining what America’s founders meant when they proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that humans’ inalienable rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. …
But today that opportunity is in peril. Evidence is mounting that people at the bottom are increasingly stuck without skills or pathways to rise. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston shows that in the 1980s, 21 percent of Americans in the bottom income quintile would rise to the middle quintile or higher over a 10-year period. By 2005, that percentage had fallen by nearly a third, to 15 percent. And a 2007 Pew analysis showed that mobility is more than twice as high in Canada and most of Scandinavia than it is in the United States.
This is a major problem, and advocates of free enterprise have been too slow to recognize it. It is not enough to assume that our system blesses each of us with equal opportunities. We need to fight for the policies and culture that will reverse troubling mobility trends. We need schools that serve children’s civil rights instead of adults’ job security. We need to encourage job creation for the most marginalized and declare war on barriers to entrepreneurship at all levels, from hedge funds to hedge trimming. And we need to revive our moral appreciation for the cultural elements of success.
We must also clear up misconceptions. Free enterprise does not mean shredding the social safety net, but championing policies that truly help vulnerable people and build an economy that can sustain these commitments. It doesn’t mean reflexively cheering big business, but leveling the playing field so competition trumps cronyism. It doesn’t entail “anything goes” libertinism, but self-government and self-control. And it certainly doesn’t imply that unfettered greed is laudable or even acceptable.
Free enterprise gives the most people the best shot at earning their success and finding enduring happiness in their work. It creates more paths than any other system to use one’s abilities in creative and meaningful ways, from entrepreneurship to teaching to ministry to playing the French horn. This is hardly mere materialism, and it is much more than an economic alternative. Free enterprise is a moral imperative.
While you slept last night, I worked.
For 25 years (if you count my seven years in institutional public relations), I’ve worked in journalism.
The Newscastic GIF factory created two lists that, well, total 25 — first, the 15 things we journalists have to do before we can consider ourselves real journalists, including:
Write a 15-inch story in 30 minutes
Have a meltdown in the restroom at least once
Replace two of the major food groups with coffee and liquor
Own your own police scanner
Eat in your car more often than you do at a table
Get fired for no good reason
Forget what it’s like to have a weekend off
Being told to “fuck off “ and “go to hell” by a source (or an editor)
Wake up in a cold sweat thinking about tomorrow’s edition
Can no longer read a story without scanning for typos and errors
Conduct an interview while in a towel
Rip into a spokesperson over the phone
I admit that most of these have happened to me, though I’d replace “car” with “desk” in the eating item and “bathroom” with “office” in the meltdown item. I may have been told to go to hell, and I may have told someone(s) to go to hell, but, you know, the F-word is kind of inappropriate in the workplace. (At least at a volume others can hear.) As for being fired for no good reason, in business, there’s always a good reason, and possibly one or more documented reasons.
I don’t believe I’ve ever awakened in a cold sweat about the next issue, though the work needed on the next issue has kept me awake at times, though really not recently. By this point, I’m familiar with the amount of work that needs to get done, and I’m also familiar with the feeling it’ll never get done. And yet, at its appointed day (unless the Postal Service screws up delivery), there it is.
The 15th item on this list was “Couldn’t imagine doing anything else.” I’m not including it because (1) the young woman pictured looks like no journalist who has ever lived on this planet, (2) you should never love your job, because your job doesn’t love you, and neither does your employer, and (3) the more correct sentence is “I can’t do anything else well,” because you should work at what you do best, not what you’re most passionate about, or whatever term a two-bit motivational speaker or writer uses.
The remaining 10 items would have been usable 25 years ago — 10 ways to not look stupid in this line of work, including:
1. NEVER, EVER ASSUME
When we say never assume, we mean never, never, never, never, ever. Sure, 99 percent of the time you’re right when you assume but it’s that one time when you are wrong that assuming will bite you in the ass.
2. WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING, ASK YOUR SOURCE
This goes back to the first rule – don’t assume. Ask a source to explain what the judge said, what the vote meant, or just what the hell is going on. Being clueless is not as bad as being wrong. Most sources will be happy to explain what’s happening rather than have it reported wrong.
3. DO YOUR HOMEWORK
Journalists can’t read a press release or court briefing three minutes before and expect to be prepared. Journalists are expected to know the basics of any story (the who, what, when, where, and how). Being unprepared wastes time – your time and your sources’ time.
4. HAVE DIRECTIONS
With the advent of Google Maps and GPS, there’s no excuse not to know where you’re going. Sometimes even being five minutes late could mean the difference between a great story and a mediocre story. Even if you think you know the address, before heading out of the newsroom, double check your directions.
5. KNOW WHO YOU’RE TALKING TO
Nothing is more insulting to an elected official or a big-shot business executive than some journalist asking, “And what’s your name?” These people are walking egos and if journalists want to have just five minutes of their time, they must stroke those egos. Learning who’s who is critical for journalists.
6. KNOW YOUR HISTORY
A news story without context is almost useless to readers. Editors don’t have time to sit down and explain the 20-year history of the monument that is about to be torn down. They say journalists are the writers of the first draft of history but journalists need to know a little history in order to do their job. So before heading off to an assignment, do a Google news search, talk to the reporter who wrote the last article on the issue, or troll through the newspaper’s morgue.
7. HAVE STYLE
Nothing pisses off an editor more than reading the copy of a journalist who obviously hasn’t fallen asleep while reading the AP Stylebook. The AP Stylebook should be a journalist’s Bible.
8. GET EVERYTHING YOU NEED THE FIRST TIME
Journalists usually have one shot to get all the information they need. Believe it or not, sources don’t sit at their desks just waiting for a journalist to call. When meeting with a source or attending an event, get all the information you’re going to need. Sure, there might be a follow-up question or two but there’s no guarantee you’ll get those answered before deadline. Get all the information you can while you have them on the phone or in person.
9. HAVE A BACKUP PLAN
Harddrives crash, voice recorders fail, batteries die. Too many journalists have been burned by having something go out on them. Don’t just record the interview, take notes as well because one day that recorder will fail. Back up your copy after every drink of coffee, make copies of your files, and keep a back-up battery for your cell phone in the car. Trust us, you’ll need it some day.
The last item is actually something I’ve learned in sports announcing, particularly when your equipment never seems to work 100 percent right. Even if (as has happened to me) you have to borrow someone else’s cellphone to broadcast a game, you have to get it done.
Today in 1963, James Carroll of WWDC radio in Washington became the first U.S. DJ to broadcast a Beatles song:
Carroll, whose station played the song once an hour, got the 45 from his girlfriend, a flight attendant. Capitol Records considered going to court, but chose to release the 45 early instead.
Today in 1969, 50 million people watched NBC-TV’s “Tonight” because of a wedding:
The number one British single today in 1973:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 