Spotlight on the Labor of Local Journalism

I know, I know, I'm a bad journalist.

I had not seen the Academy Award winning movie "Spotlight" until last night.

I'm not sure it surpasses my other favorite Michael Keaton newspaper movie, "The Paper," on my list, but it is definitely up there.

I told myself I would not write about it, that I would just enjoy it like a regular Joe, and then I did a stupid thing. I started thinking about it.

For those of you who don't know, the movie is about a the team of investigative reporters from The Boston Globe who finally told the world about the Catholic Church's problem with priests molesting children.

So of course I would like it.

Gallant and persistent newspaper people doggedly digging out the evidence to reveal a wrong, it's enough to make you love newspapers again.

Except love is not enough.

Newspapers, as we all know and as I've written here before, are not healthy.

Fewer people read them and even fewer people pay for them, which is the crux of the problem. Given that in order to, as Liv Schreiber's character says in the movie "the newspaper should stand alone" (among Boston's great institutions), it has to make its own money.

If you haven't seen it yet (and you have 20 minutes to spare) comedian John Oliver explained it all pretty well on his HBO show "This Week Tonight:"



The fact that Oliver uses "Spotlight" as the basis for his parody at the end of the piece only makes it that much more relevant for my purposes.

When newspapers were making money by the bucket, it was easy for them to convince themselves that they could be capitalists and protectors of the public trust. But money has become an issue.

I could not help, while watching this movie, thinking about Oliver's piece, which I had seen prior to the movie, and thinking about how expensive it was to keep this team of reporters and editors, focused on this one story for month after month.

First page of the first day of the "Do or Die Time" series.

I can tell you this, in case you didn't already know, we don't do that kind of thing at The Mercury any more.

We used to.

When I began at The Mercury in 1997, it was not long before I was assigned "a project," which grew into the five-day "Pottstown: Do or Die Time" series, which some of you may recall and is now so old I cannot provide you with a link because it was never on a web site.

During the four or six weeks I was given to research that project, my beat was covered by another reporter -- even, rather painfully -- when Mrs. Smith's Pies announced it was closing its Pottstown plant.

Page 2, Day 1 of said series

Since then, however, any big projects I've worked on at The Mercury have been cobbled together in addition to covering my regular beat. And since then, my
beat has grown larger as the staff has grown smaller and I don't think our readers can expect too many "Spotlight" worthy investigations landing on their doorstep any time soon.

For as money gets tighter, ad revenues drop, staffs get cut and the capitalism part increasingly overshadows the government watchdog part.

The Mercury, and its sister newspapers in what we call "the Philadelphia cluster" are owned by Digital First Media, a company that is owned or controlled by a hedge fund named Alden Global Capital.

Hedge funds, as you probably know, are a little more focused on capitalism than they are on journalism. And so as our owners cut photographers, editors and reporters in a self-immolating effort to slice their way to double-digit returns (we manage single digit returns with old staff levels but remember -- hedge fund), the question  arises: can newspapers survive?"

Jim Rutenberg tackled that question Sunday in The New York Times, and yes I see the irony thank you. (Also ironic, you may have to pay to read that link).

The answer is in the long run, probably not. The more vital question, in my mind, is can the function of newspapers survive?

Although the romantic in me loves the feel and legacy of newspapers, I am not so naive as to believe they must exist forever. Already many of us, perhaps most of us, read our newspapers on-line, for free if we can.

But more disturbing is how we end up reading them.

Chances are they come to us in some kind of social media feed and studies show readers view a New York Times expose about increased flooding due to global warming with the same level of interest (importance) as the photo their friend just took of the ice cream cone he is about to eat.

Further still, consider what happened when our friends at Facebook recently fired all the human beings overseeing their "trending topics" function -- and within two days had identified a fake news story as trending.

Now to be fair, it was revealed before that decision was announced that the humans who had been in charge of "trending topics" apparently had been letting their bias show in what topics were trending, so its a kind of six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-another conundrum.

But left to choose between outright falsehood or human bias in what Facebook tells us people are reading, put me squarely in the fallible humans column if for no other reason than because I'm not sure how you get accountability from an algorithm.

Which brings us back to the human equation, i.e., that imperfect species of human known as "journalist."

If you agree that A) they are currently preferable to machines in producing the news you consume and, B) its preferable to have people who know a thing or two about the business in charge, than you reach the inevitable conclusion that C), you're going to have to pay them; preferably a living wage so they can concentrate on their work and not the need to leave early for their second job bagging groceries.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the Labor Day portion of our tirade.

The Mercury is among several newspapers in our cluster, and among many more across the country, who are members of a union -- The Newspaper Guild.

Our Guild is part of a larger union, The Communications Workers of America, or CWA.

A grant from the CWA helped pay for an effort by Digital First Media guild workers to mount a media campaign highlighting not only the plight of news workers who had gone without raises for as long as 10 years, but also how hedge fund ownership of your local newspaper affects what news you get and what that means for your community.

In fact I was researching an article for the effort's web site on what happens to a place when its local newspaper goes under when the unprecedented happened -- Digital First Media sat down in Denver with every Guild unit within its newspapers and negotiated a three-year contract that included the first raise in years and a 5 percentage point reduction in our share of health insurance premiums (from 40 percent to 35 percent).

This is obviously good news, and good news to share on Labor Day.

But let's be honest.

It is an overdue battlefield victory in a long war of attrition which ultimately news workers and, even more ultimately, small towns like Pottstown, are bound to lose unless something changes in the basic equation.

Unless an economically sustainable way can be found to provide the local journalism function, it simply cannot continue as it is now.

 And while I cannot tell you how to fix it -- smarter people than me haven't succeeded yet -- I can tell you what it means.

Simply put, it means more corruption, fewer voters, more incumbents being reelected.

In 2007, the Cincinnati Post closed, and had the good grace to announce it ahead of time. This allowed Princeton Assistant Professor of economics and public affairs Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido to study the before and after affects on civic life in the northern Kentucky towns where the Post's coverage dominated.

As Time magazine summarized: "in towns the Post regularly covered, voter turnout dropped, fewer people ran for office and more incumbents were reelected. That is, when there were fewer stories about a given town, its inhabitants seemed to care less about how they're being governed."

Another Princeton study found a director correlation between the circulation of newspapers in a democracy, and the level of corruption in its government.

"Free circulation of newspapers has a very strong effect on the level of corruption," the study authors found.

"A change in the level of circulation in newspapers from its median to its maximum level would reduce the level of corruption."

And if you're looking for a real life example of this hypothesis, look no further than the City of Bell, California.

Elected city council members were being paid $80,000 and approved raises for the city administrator, Robert Rizzo, that paid him $880,000 per year and would have gained him a pension of $1 million.

Robert Rizzo

This, while the city was laboring under huge tax increases and huge deficits.

The state pension system should have realized the problem when those papers were filed but, surprise!, it didn't.

How did they get away with it for years? One factor was the closing of the local newspaper in 1998, the same year tRizzo was hired. No one knew what was happening.

And it took a team of reporters from the Los Angeles Times, Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives, to uncover the corruption and publicize it in 2010, an effort that won them a Pulitzer Prize.

The Los Angeles Times celebrates its Pulitzer.

As newspapers fade, such scandals will become
more common and less reported.

But ask yourself, how many others are there out there? How many more towns and cities, small and large, which no longer have an independent watchdog in the local media, are looting the taxpayers?

They wouldn't even know, and neither do we.

Because there is no one being paid to tell us.

And although Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism studies increasingly show that the public does not recognize, or appreciate, the role local media plays in making their lives better, as Conrad Fink, a former journalist who teaches newspaper management and strategy at the University of Georgia puts it: "The American public doesn't realize it, but they're going to miss us if we're gone."

From Science to Science Fiction and Back Again (Gold Edition)

It's another thrilling installment of (drum roll):

This Saturday in Space Science!

This week has a space theme and we begin with a piece about a very earthly concern -- Gold.

Credit: Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital, Inc.

The collision of two neutron stars can create rare elements like gold. Image released on July 17, 2013. 

Space Bling

So did you know that all the gold in the earth may come from the stars?

Me neither.

But thanks to Time magazine, I, and now you, know that scientists think all the gold in the universe may be

formed by the collision of neutron stars.

Yup, it all comes from space.

It seems that back in the universe's early days, "there was nothing but hydrogen, helium and lithium. Heavier elements, on up to iron, were forged later by the heat and pressure deep inside stars. 'We are all star stuff,' as Carl Sagan loved to say, in his inimitably geeky way," time science writer Michael Lemonick wrote in his July 18 article.

"Even stars can’t make elements as heavy as gold, however. For that, you need some sort of powerful shockwave, and until now it’s been unclear what could set it off. But a team of Harvard astronomers has come up a possible answer. The gold in our fillings and our jewelry and in Fort Knox may have been created during titanic collisions between neutron stars, the unimaginably dense husks left over after a massive star dies," Time reported.

Evidence for this theory materialized last month when NASA’s orbiting Swift telescope initially spotted a burst of high-energy gamma rays that lasted just two-tenths of a second.

Astronomers quickly trained the twin, Chile-based Magellan telescopes on the spot, and caught a glow of visible light, which let them gauge the distance to whatever had exploded at 3.9 billion light-years from Earth. When they aimed the Hubble at that piece of sky a week later, the light

was still there, but it had faded until it shone only in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The light’s characteristics can best be explained, say Berger, by a burst of brand new atoms totaling more than 3,000 times the mass of the Earth. Some are radioactive, which causes the glow. Some are atoms of platinum and lead and other heavy elements. And some, totaling several times the mass of the Moon, are pure gold.

"We estimate that the amount of gold produced and ejected during the merger of the two neutron stars may be as large as 10 moon masses - quite a lot of bling!" lead author Edo Berger, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a statement, published by Space.com. "To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we are all star stuff, and our jewelry is colliding-star stuff."

So next time, you get a golden necklace for Christmas, give proper props to those neutron stars.

If you want to see video of two neutron stars colliding from Space.com, click here.

A scene from "Europa Report

'Reality' Science Fiction 

The following is from a July 12 Yahoo News report:

The new science fiction movie "Europa Report" is billed by some admirers as one of the most accurate depictions of human spaceflight ever put on film, and that realism is no accident.

Screenwriters, expert consultants, actors and others worked to bring a sense of reality to "Europa Report," paying meticulous attention to the world they were creating in the spaceship and depicting on the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

The movie follows the journey of a crew of astronauts sent on the first manned mission to Europa. It is shot documentary-style and features interviews with various people involved in the harrowing undertaking to seek out alien life in the solar system. You can watch the "Europa Report" trailer here.

The filmmakers also added a few hidden gems for fans of space travel. The rocket launch shown at the beginning of the film was footage from the 2011 launch of NASA's Juno spacecraft, expected to arrive at Jupiter in 2016.

"Europa Report" is currently available in the iTunes store and is set for release in theaters on Aug. 2.

The European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, captured this image of a gigantic coronal hole hovering over the sun’s north pole on July 18, 2013, at 9:06 a.m. EDT.

Solar to the Max 

Blogger's Note: Karen C. Fox wrote the following for the NASA web site:

The European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, captured this image of a gigantic coronal hole hovering over the sun’s north pole on July 18, 2013, at 9:06 a.m. EDT. Coronal holes are dark, low density regions of the sun’s outermost atmosphere, the corona. They contain little solar material, have lower temperatures, and therefore, appear much darker than their surroundings.

Coronal holes are a typical feature on the sun, though they appear at different places and with more frequency at different times of the sun’s activity cycle. The activity cycle is currently ramping up toward what is known as solar maximum, currently predicted for late 2013. During this portion of the cycle, the number of coronal holes decreases. During solar max, the magnetic fields on the sun reverse and new coronal holes appear near the poles with the opposite magnetic alignment. The coronal holes then increase in size and number, extending further from the poles as the sun moves toward solar minimum again. At such times, coronal holes have appeared that are even larger than this one.

The holes are important to our understanding of space weather, as they are the source of a high-speed wind of solar particles that streams off the sun some three times faster than the slower wind elsewhere. While it’s unclear what causes coronal holes, they correlate to areas on the sun where magnetic fields soar up and away, failing to loop back down to the surface, as they do elsewhere.

A Little Perspective (Very Little)

We came across this image recently in NASA's Twitter feed.

It shows how the earth looks from Saturn.

(Hint: The "you are here" arrow shows where we are....)

So next time you're whizzing past Saturn, this might help you find your way home.

Looking for Life in All the Right Places

Forget Mars, is there life on one of Jupiter's moons? The conditions may exist.

Blogger's Note: HA! It's Science Saturday on SUNDAY! Bet you didn't see that one coming dear reader.

Some people look for God, or the gods, among the stars, while others limit their search to Switzerland.

Here on Science Sunday, we can accommodate both.

Zeus and Europa had a non-traditional

relationship.

And to be fair, what they are really looking for in the stars, at least in this case, is not so much God, but life, or at least the proper environment for it. Scientists are  just looking for it among the Roman gods whose names we appropriated for the planets of our solar system.

And it looks like there may be hope not on Mars, where we're focusing most of our scientific energy these days and where signs of former life may be present, but on a moon of Jupiter named Europa.

Named after a lover of Zeus, who had a lot I'm told, Europa is the sixth closest moon to the gas giant Jupiter, was discovered by Galileo and is only slightly smaller than Earth's own single moon.

Most important about Europa is the fact that it's covered in water and, apparently, that water is pretty toasty warm because of gravitational forces and the moon's warm interior.

According to this article in Time magazine:

Gravitationally plucked by the tidal tugging of its sister moon Io and Jupiter itself, Europa retains a hot interior, which keeps the water comparatively warm and even pulsing. If that doesn’t sound like a place that could cook up life, nothing does. The only ingredients missing to make Europa’s ocean a potential home to living things have been salt and organic compounds. Now, according to a study about to be published in The Astronomical Journal, they’re not missing anymore. A dip in the waters of Europa, the paper concludes, could be very much like a dip in our oceans, perhaps with all the biology that implies.

When the Galileo probe showed up, it became clear that Europa’s ice coating was thick—but more important, the cracks, now clearly evident, meant the ice was floating, forever being fractured and re-fractured by the movement of the ocean below and the flexing of the moon itself. Neighboring Io is continually squeezed the same way, but there isn’t much water there, so the internal heating leads instead to sulfur-spewing volcanoes.

The Keck observatory in Hawaii.

None of this meant Europa had the ingredients for life: you could keep a tank of sterile water warm and churning for 4.5 billion years and at the end, all you’d have would be the same tank of sterile water. Finding evidence of the organics and salt was the key, and that has at last been provided, thanks to a set of observations by the giant Keck II telescope in Hawaii.

There is not absolute proof of salt in Europa's waters, just speculation, based on it's magnetic field, which would not be generated by fresh water, and with other chemicals being ruled out.

Still, it’s a speculation with big implications. The fractures on the surface have always suggested that the water in the ocean is not entirely trapped by the crust, but instead bubbles up and back down, with the chemistry of the ice above and the water below commingling. It’s statistically inevitable that Europa has been bombarded by many comets during its long lifetime, and since comets are known to contain carbon-based organic compounds, the oceans would be laced with the stuff too, rounding out the recipe for biology.

When Nasa's Galileo probe visited Jupiter and Europa in

the 1990s, its electronics were vintage 1970s.

“I’m not an expert on life,” says Caltech planetary scientist Mike Brown. “But I do know that if you dip a net in the ocean here, you’re bound to pick up something.” Even if you could not get your net two miles deep into the Europan ocean, simply sampling the surface ice would tell you a lot. “You could just land on the surface, dig up a scoop, and know what the chemistry of the ocean really is,” says Brown.

That kind of hands-on study is not likely to happen soon; even a robot lander would be too ambitious (read: too expensive) for the current NASA. Instead, the agency is thinking about a probe called the Europa Clipper, which would orbit Jupiter and make flybys as little as 10 miles above the Europan surface. Armed with far better instruments than Galileo’s vintage electronics, it would nail down the chemistry on the moon’s surface. If that chemistry is life-friendly, the case for a lander would be much stronger—and perhaps irresistible. We’ve never before encountered seawater, after all, that didn’t have at least a little something swimming around in it.

So enough about gods, how about God? Or at least, the "God particle.."

According to this Associated Press article in your very own ever-lovin' Mercury, the search for the next big clue in The Big Bang Theory (no, not the one with Sheldon Cooper) may have been found this month.

In what could go down as one of the great Eureka! moments in physics — and win somebody the Nobel Prize — scientists said Thursday that after a half-century quest, they are confident they have found a Higgs boson, the elusive subatomic speck sometimes called the “God particle.”

I prefer DaVinci's depiction of God over this modern

art version.

The existence of the particle was theorized in 1964 by the British physicist Peter Higgs to explain why matter has mass. Scientists believe the particle acts like molasses or snow: When other tiny basic building blocks pass through it, they stick together, slow down and form atoms.
Scientists at CERN, the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced in July that they had found something that looked like the Higgs boson, but they weren’t certain, and they needed to go through the data and rule out the possibility it wasn’t something else.

On Thursday, they said they believe they got it right.

“To me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is,” said Joe Incandela, a physicist who heads one of the two main teams at CERN, each involving about 3,000 scientists.

 So, we've got that going for us....

The Avatar's Avatar to Speak at The Hill

Jaron Lanier

The Hill School will welcome Jaron Lanier - author, computer scientist, composer, and artist – to campus on Thursday, Feb. 16,  at 7:30 p.m. in the Center For The Arts.


Lanier will speak on this year’s School theme of Community. Interested members of the Pottstown community are invited to attend this free event.

Lanier’s early work involved creating innovative technologies that now are part of our every-day vocabulary. In the 1980s, he created VPL Research where he coined the term “virtual reality”; VPL was the first company to sell virtual reality products.

He also was the lead of the team that created the first “avatars.” Lanier currently is a partner architect at Microsoft Research.

In 2009, Lanier received a Lifetime Career Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

In 2010, he published You are Not a Gadget, A Manifesto.

The book was on multiple best –seller’s lists and was named by the New York Times as one of the best books of the year. That same year, Time magazine named him one of the Top 100 People Who Most Affect Our World. In that article, his book “compels readers to take a fresh look at the power — and limitations — of human interaction in a socially networked world.”

Lanier also is a composer, musician, and artist.

He's also a musician

He plays the piano as well as unique string and wind instruments from Asia.

He has been commissioned by many organizations to compose music, including the National Endowment of the Arts, and his original compositions have been featured on the soundtracks on a number of documentaries and films.

His artwork has been displayed in many galleries throughout the United States and Europe.

In addition to his performing, writing, and speaking endeavors, Lanier currently serves as an innovator-in-residence at U.S.C. Annenberg (since 2010); interdisciplinary scholar-in-residence at U.C. Berkeley (since 2006); a Fellow at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley (since 2004); and visiting faculty at Dartmouth College (since 2002).