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I’m a huge fan of The Simpsons, there’s no secret about that. One of my favorite clips, which unfortunately I can’t find on YouTube in English, comes from an episode a few years back when Homer decides to start an Internet business because he hears everyone’s making money.

The scene starts with Comic Book Guy surfing the Web for, um, adult photographs and finds the images loading too slow. He spies Homer’s “Internet King” banner ad and wonders if it’s time for an upgrade in Internet connection speed.

Cut to the next scene, with CBG visiting Homer at Homer’s “office” (his house, because, why not?):

Homer: Welcome to the internet my friend, how can I help you?

CBG: I’m interested in upgrading my 28.8 kilobaud internet connection to a one point five megabit fiber-optic T-1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP router that’s compatible with my token ring ethernet LAN configuration?

Homer: (long pause) Can I have some money now?

As Homer also might say, it’s funny because it’s true. The bit satirizes the get-rich quick era of the Internet (which seems like so long ago), when the business plan came long after the server purchase and Internet connection was set up.

I’ve been thinking about this bit a lot in the past day after reading Dean Singleton’s charged comments about the Associated Press going after aggregators and link-makers like Google for a cut of their ad revenue. They’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore (Singleton actually said this) when it comes to aggregators making money providing indexes full of links to the day’s news. This is an old argument, of course, which says that making money off of headline links is tantamount to stealing.

(facepalm)

Quick full disclosure: I worked for Singleton at two newspapers he has since destroyed, including the once-proud Los Angeles Daily News. He has a reputation for gutting the soul out of newspapers, and his workers don’t call him “Lean Dean” for nothing. Needless to say, I don’t think much of his business acumen.

Anyhow, the journalistic pitchforks have come out, and they’re coming for …. Google? The same Google that drives so much traffic to AP member sites through its Google News search engine, traffic that these publications probably couldn’t get on their own? Some accounts are saying Google delivers 30% of a site’s traffic, sometimes more.

Some pretty smart responses have emerged in the past 24 hours. I loved Jeff Jarvis’ take, which basically says this is a spiteful move for an industry that “blew it” a long time ago. NYU’s Jay Rosen has amassed a lot of other responses to go with his own and it’s worth a read (Updated: I misunderstood the context when I read Rosen’s piece, apparently it was an older reaction to a similar happening. It’s what I get for reading the post and not clicking the links, which would’ve given me more context. What’s amazing is I read it now and it still reads current). And make sure to check out the response from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Lastly, it bears noting that some of this was predicted back in 2005 by Matt Thompson’s excellent EPIC 2015.

How does this all relate to Homer’s fictional business? Most of what I’m seeing in the blogs makes the valid point that newspaper companies have had a flawed business model that misunderstands the Internet. Here at MU on the MyMissourian team, we called it the “Field Of Dreams Delusion,” which says that if we build web sites the people will come.

And build we did. We built Web structures that mirrored our print product so well that it was an online-and-free duplicate. We ignored the emerging social aspect of Web use and focused on content. We destroyed the notion of paying for content by making it free. We focused on short-term profits and trivialized the news with fluff and stuff at the expense of the red-meat journalism such as investigative reporting, then had the gall to suggest we should charge for this watered-down version of the news.

And now the newspaper industry’s last gasp is to sue Google for driving traffic to their news sites. In other words, the industry doesn’t know how to offer a product people will use or meet the consumer’s needs, but “Can I have some money now?”

No, no. A thousand times no.

There have been suggestions that newspapers revert en masse to a pay model. I think this is a terrible idea. Most of the content they produce is either not worth reading or found elsewhere on the Web. People won’t miss your gardening tips or feature stories on the local pastor enough to pay for it. I’m sorry, they just won’t (as much as I’d like them to).

I get the desire to go after aggregators who are pulling content and making money off of it that goes far beyond fair use. But I don’t get the notion of going after revenue from sites that drive traffic. Google isn’t republishing content from sites like the Kansas City Star, but rather creating index pages with searched content that point to stories about desired topics. They’re making money off of search (i.e. the cost involved with driving traffic to news sites), not the content itself.

These newspapers do not own indexes of information any more than they own the rights to conversations between people that tell others about interesting articles they read. These papers seem to be arguing essentially that they own the rights to their own promotion.

I say good luck with that. The thing about the Web is it has changed the market model of media. Whereas once a newspaper such as the Star competed against local and state competitors, in the online realm you are competing with everyone. The problem is one of visibility, and hiding behind paid content walls or biting the hand that feeds your traffic is not going to solve it.

Schmidt’s advice was worth heeding. Focus on what consumers want and on customization. Innovate. Stop blaming Google for your own mistakes. But the best way, the way out, is also the most painful one. The problem with the market model is that it requires that these companies need to innovate in three months, not one year or three years. Quarterly margins and stockholders demand profits, and innovation takes investment. This is a big reason why Jarvis’ take was so right-on: The time to innovate was 5-10 years ago, when publications could do it incrementally. You can’t do it in three months without a mass selloff on Wall Street.

It seems all sort of basic and quaint, having a business plan before the implementation, but for Singleton and the AP perhaps it’s time to state the obvious. You’re fighting the wrong war.

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During this academic year I’ve been involved in a fantastic program here at MU called Preparing Future Faculty. It is what the title describes, a program that prepares doc students for faculty life and the challenges they will face. It’s run by Dr. George Justice through the Grad School and has a lot of different facets, including monthly classes on different topics (tenure, teaching vs. research loads, etc.) as well as professional development seminars (hiring, negotiating job offers, etc.).

One of the unique things we do in the program is mentor visits. We are required to do at least one visit per semester and Dr. Justice tries to match us with people at institutions near MU who also do similar work in our field. Last semester I had a great visit at Kansas with Mike Williams, who is the chair of the news/information track. I learned a lot from him about the places career can take you as well as the challenges of teaching vs. administration. The visit also took place right before Lehigh offered me the position in December, so it gave me a lot to think about.

Today I went on my second visit. I spent the day shadowing Dr. Dan Kozlowski at Saint Louis University. This was a different experience. Whereas KU is a large public Research I institution in profile, SLU is more in the profile of what I’ll be experiencing as a member of the faculty at Lehigh. SLU has a strong commitment to both research and teaching, and it was evident throughout the day as I observed Dr. Kozlowski in his normal duties.

In visiting SLU I am reminded of why I feel so happy to be going to Lehigh, because the two schools are similar in terms of size, number of majors, and balance of teaching and research. It was interesting to watch Dr. Kozlowski’s pedagogy in action, for example, because the way he teaches seems to embody a lot of what I heard was valued at Lehigh. He has an engaging style in the classroom and I saw a lot of good techniques on building rapport. But we also got a good chance to talk about the balancing act between cultivating those interactions with students while upholding standards.

I observed Dr. Kozlowski teach two classes, but the best parts of these visits for me is the chance to interact during downtime. I got to ask lots of questions about the tenure process, balancing career and family, grading, and working to make your expectations of a program or school a reality. What’s interesting is he’s a few years younger than me but already has accomplished so much and experienced a great deal. Getting a chance to hear his perspective on some of these things I’m just starting to deal with was helpful.

I also relish a chance to talk about research and philosophy in our field with like minds, and it seems like we share a lot of interests (including that we both did sports in our industry work). I joked that his book case was like a scene from my comps nightmares, because it looked awfully familiar (Lippmann, Dewey, research methods books, Lee Wilkins’ ethics book, The Missouri Group’s reporting book, and so on). And the lecture in media history today used the radio broadcast of the Hindenburg explosion as an example of how immediacy changes the way we view news, information, and culture - one of my favorite topics.

As an aside, I really love Jesuit universities. The campuses are always so nice and the environments always seem to ooze learning and scholarship. Santa Clara U, from my own backyard, remains one of my favorite schools.

Finding the right mentor-mentee matchings can be tricky for Dr. Justice to set up, I am sure, but I have to say I’ve been quite happy with the profesors I’ve been paired with and have been so grateful for their generosity in giving me time to learn from them. Professor Williams and Dr. Kozlowski are at different stages of their careers and have taken different routes to get where they are now, but the two visits have really given me a better picture of faculty life. I’m not getting just the public R1 or the smaller private perspective. The visits have had the effect of enlarging my outlook on our field and the opportunities that await me “out there.”

I think I also came away a little more confident. Both visits seem to confirm that I research and teach is in an area that has value to journalism schools and departments. I still think my particular take regarding social media and a new information ecology is an acquired taste for some (particularly the traditionalists among us), but the more I talk with people I meet in my field the more I feel I’m on the right track in the long run.

Either way, I have quite a bit to chew on in the coming weeks.

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I spent last weekend on the West Coast and had basically five days with sparse internet access. Little on e-mail, less on Twitter or Facebook.

I realized how wired I am and how weird it feels to be unplugged. I have to say, I didn’t like it. The lack of social connection - even while spending time with friends and family - was a new sensation.

I might try the email fast sometime this summer. I’ve been kicking around the idea for a while, but I might want to take it to a new level and see what happens.

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Facebook went live with its redesign this week, and if I may take a moment to be a bad researcher and generalize from a small sample, everyone hates it. This is probably an exaggeration, but then again I can confirm that I’m the only one I know who likes it.

I like what they’ve done by making the home page a live feed of what people are doing. The ability to filter by user-created groups helps cut down on some of the noise, and it will probably hasten the use of this feature by people who didn’t know it was there before the launch.

It looks like Twitter, and I think there’s a reason for that. Twitter, while claiming less than 1/1000 of Facebook’s users, clearly is on to something with its rapid growth. And it is more mobile friendly right now than Facebook. This appears to be a case of Facebook tapping a good idea and also trying to stay ahead of the competition before it loses market share.

The fact that I like it probably says more about my use of Twitter than anything. I tend to be on there more than Facebook because it gives maximum information value while requiring less attention.

Whether this move is a good idea long term is up in the air. Any relaunch that makes drastic changes like this one requires the entire audience to have to reorient themselves. With two major redesigns in the past year, that’s a lot to ask of an audience when utility is a premium part of your product.

On the other hand, where will the audience go? To MySpace, where the orientation learning curve is even worse? Smaller networks like LinkedIn that require not only a switch but convincing your network to do so as well? There aren’t a lot of options.

To a degree, it appears Facebook is using its dominant market position to introduce drastic changes that will allow it to compete with an upstart like Twitter at a time where there’s no serious challenger to scoop up a dissatisfied audience.

It’s a bold move, and not one you see from media companies in a dominant position. Rather than just gobble up competitors, they are being attacked head on from a position of strength.

It’s something I wish newspapers had done while they had the market position and profitability to innovate. Innovation from a position of desperation is a completely different ballgame, and often amounts to a series of stabs in the dark.

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Clay Shirky’s post that examines the historical underpinnings behind the current newspaper collapse is making the rounds today on all my social media channels. It’s longish, and a pretty detailed, but if you’re concerned about collapse of this medium in your community it is worth the time.

As I read it, I am reminded that as much as I loved the good old days, we aren’t going back. The model between information access, publishing ability, advertising, and economics has shifted too radically. It doesn’t mean newspapers are going to die, but it does mean that the old business model is only going to work in some types of settings (small rural towns come to mind). By extension, though, it means that more newspapers are going under if they don’t radically shift gears. The model just isn’t sustainable in certain community types.

I am glad that Shirky offered a road map for the way forward. A cynic would say he’s being vague, but at this point I’d settle for a vague set of principles to guide innovation. We’re still at that stage. Anyone claiming to have the answer is being dishonest.

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In case you missed Jon Stewart’s brilliant interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer yesterday, I’ve embedded part of the clip above. But I would go to DailyShow.com to see the full episode and even to watch the full unedited interview, because it is a fascinating peek at what journalism sometimes is missing in financial coverage.

In case you’ve missed the news coverage this has gotten (CNN / NYT / WaPost), Stewart took Cramer to task for the fact that he and his network essentially cheered on a bubble built on working class dollars while hedge fund managers and Wall Street insiders cashed in.

If the pundits only focus on how entertaining this was (and it was entertaining), this is a missed opportunity. Stewart’s interview not only exposed the culture of CNBC’s reporting habits, which are filled with conflicts of interest, but also showed how it’s done in an era where expert pundits often are fresh off the payroll of the industry they’re covering.

Two things stuck out, and they relate to elements laid out by Kovach & Rosenstiel in their excellent The Elements Of Journalism.

First, Cramer rightly noted that he’s called out companies on CEOs that have been dishonest and defrauded people of their money. When Stewart challenged him on this by noting that screaming about it after the fact does little good to people who’ve lost everything in the Wall Street meltdown, Cramer flat out said something to the effect of, “Look, these CEOs lied to me. They were my friends and they lied about the health of their companies.”

Few critics I’ve read have snapped to attention on this one, perhaps because we’ve taken for granted how important it is that professional journalists be rigorous and independent. Kovach & Rosenstiel have this as their own element:

Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.

This is not a choice. Credibility is the lifeblood of professional journalism, the one thing that separates it from partisan media. And you can’t have credibility unless you break down these conflicts of interests.

Now, Cramer might say he’s not a journalist, but we shouldn’t let him off the hook that easily. He works for a financial news channel. He dispenses advice daily with the disclaimer that he’s not your broker. So what is he then? An entertainer? No, he’s a pundit for a news channel. He’s expected to show qualities that befit the network he is on, ratings be damned.

The second thing that stuck out was the question of loyalty. The classic moment on last night’s show was when Stewart showed video for subscribers and insiders that had Cramer talking in 2007 about how to game the system using fear and misinformation. Jay Rosen tweeted something this morning on Twitter that summed it up well:

Barons hit Cramer for being a poor stock picker, @mattwaite. Stewart was saying: you and your network have the wrong loyalties. Comparable?

This is where some of the misplaced anger goes. In the two-week war between CNBC and The Daily Show, some have assumed that Stewart is riled up that CNBC simply made some bad stock picks and cost people a lot about money. But this riff hasn’t been about money, not for Stewart. He is criticizing something much deeper and more insidious than financial losses. He is saying that when a network does not aggressively pursue independent reporting, does not fact check and verify what is being said, and does not offer up more than CEOs and talking heads that cheerlead the whole process, then that network is not serving the public. Rather, that network is serving the financial industry and those who thrive on rumor and speculation to make money as a result of fear.

K&R have an element for this too

Journalism’s first loyalty is to citizens.

While many on Wall Street are making use of the advice CNBC offers daily, the network sells itself as the vital source of news for the working Joes who have their money in 401(k) accounts and pension funds, people who need their investments for retirement. And when the network is found to be reporting “news” out of one side of their mouth and shilling for insiders and CEOs on the other side, the network is no longer serving that citizenry. It is serving itself.

In truth, this isn’t entirely CNBC’s fault. The trend with cable news the past 10 years is to throw up talking heads on different sides of an issue (often only two sides, sadly), debate it around for 5-8 minutes, come up with no resolution, and then cut to commercial. No questions are really answered, no insight is gleaned. Just lots of yelling.

Even a lot of the prime time shows like O’Reilly, Hannity, Campbell Brown, Lou Dobbs, and Hardball follow this mold (Olbermann and Maddow thankfully are exceptions). This has become the M.O. for political coverage, and it has crept into other areas such as financial news. The problem is that when you do this, the audience has very little reason to trust the yell crowd on the TV, but the journalist who promotes this mess by giving them air time in the first place also loses the audience’s trust. This cable format may allow the networks to do it on the cheap (because what is cheaper than meaningless debate that gets us nowhwere?), but it does little for democracy’s bottom line.

The reason Stewart’s audience trusts him is not because he’s liberal and they’re liberal. They trust him because he asks legitimate questions, seeks legitimate answers, and eschews theater when the moment demands it. His loyalty is to the citizenry, in the name of answers. And he’s a comedian!

I hope yesterday was not a missed moment. The public needs to realize that Stewart, as he does most nights, is using comedy to show us how it is supposed to be done, and that we need to support good rigorous journalism with our dollars.

On the other hand, journalists, especially at the big media, need to ignore the seductive self-interest of access if it means denying yourself independence, verification, and loyalties to the people who trust you.

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New York Times media writer David Carr penned an interesting piece that has gotten some play in media circles today. Summing up the feelings of a lot of my fellow journalists, he modestly proposes that newspapers get together and end the free ride on the Web for both readers and aggregators.

In other words, charge.

Carr notes that for this to work it’s going to take some collusion among newspaper companies, which is probably illegal and would require antitrust law changes to make it happen. A lot of what he’s saying is a rehash of what others have suggested, but it’s a pretty solid summary of the camp that wants to charge now and often.

The news lover in me would love for this to happen, but there are a lot of problems associated with charging right now. The main one is that the public is unaccustomed to paying, and I’m not sure how quickly they could be converted even if the product was worth it. How long can these companies, already suffering financially, survive a game of chicken with millions of Web users who expect that information on the Web generally be free?

Carr notes that there are examples of companies successfully charging for content on the Web. He’s correct, with some caveats. First, the most successful examples we have niche products, and with newspapers we’re talking about mass media.

But there’s a larger problem, one that I don’t see being asked often enough: Is the content newspapers are producing worth paying for?

The newspapers-are-a-watchdog-on-government crowd (a crowd I really, really love) would scream “Of course!” But how much of what we seen in the daily newspaper fits that purpose? When I worked at the Daily News, I’d say at least 60-70% of the newspaper editorial content on an average day was devoted to things other than hard news. Things like sports, entertainment, home/garden, and so forth - stuff I love, but would I pay for it?

I’d pay for good solid coverage of local civics and investigative work, but I suppose I am a rarity. I value that information and know I can only get it from my local newspaper. But what of the other content, the softer news. Will people pay for that? Do they really feel like they need a newspaper to give them gardening advice or movie reviews or would they be just as fine reading a blog? Or, would a powerhouse brand like ESPN become the source because they have the economies of scale in place to bury newspapers by making it free?

The argument we make is that news matters because they are the Fourth Estate, and it’s an argument I agree with. But I also believe it is intellectually dishonest to make that argument synonymous with the need to save the newspaper. Saving the entertainment section or my daily dose of Dilbert isn’t the same thing as rigorous government coverage.

Sure, by charging for all we can save the red meat part of the paper, but what kind of business model is that? Imagine Wal-Mart saying they’re going to use all the profits from 90% of the store to subsidize a small portion of its store that is a money-loser and has no expectation of turning it around.

Perhaps charging for it all would let people understand the value of news and make them want to pay, but I doubt it. You are fighting a war on two fronts: the apathy of the nonpaying Web public, and the sense that news has become more fluff than stuff over the years as news budgets have taken a hit. Stuff that doesn’t change overnight.

Too much, too soon. I think people will pay again, but you have to lead them along the path. We’re not ready for this kind of marketplace, and we’re really not ready for how few jobs would be out there were we to start going with a pay-only model tomorrow.

It would be the Great Charge, the last gasp for a crumbling industrial model of news production. And I fear it would lead most of these companies over a cliff. And perhaps it’s a FTW moment for companies that think they’re dying anyway, but that would be the cop-out option rather than tapping into some of the wonderful innovative things being tried at newspapers all over the country.

I’m more bullish on the future of news than I’ve ever been, but I’m not-so-bullish on using old models that don’t work as a fallback position.

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ESPN recently launched a site devoted to sports fans’ travels to sporting events, and it’s pretty slick. In addition to offering travel guides for fans looking to attend faraway events such as spring training, ESPN Sports Travel also gives fans a chance to upload content and memories from their trip (such as photos) under the Passport menu.

It also gives fans back a little bit of power to rate many different aspects of the sports fan experience.

Better, the site is cross-branded using a sponsorship from Orbitz, giving the site a sponsorship that both makes sense and connects to the actual content. In addition to giving sponsorship for the site, Orbitz travel deals are prominent on the page and give fans a resource looking for travel deals.

In some ways this might be an unfortunate time to launch such an offering. With the economy stumbling along, some have noted that professional sports could suffer in terms of ticket sales and implicit in that is that travel for events might decrease as well. USA Today seemed to confirm this idea this week when it reported that Spring Training attendance is down this year for the Arizona teams.

Despite the obvious challenges, ESPN’s idea has legs. Giving fans the ability to post photos and memories from sporting events for free, coupled with the ESPN brand name, will give people a reason to return. The service also gives fans a chance to use a bit of crowdsourcing by allowing them to rate sports venues, among other things.

ESPN also was pretty smart about setting it up and avoided a lot of the mistakes we’ve seen at professional news sites (i.e. lack of crosslinking, a clear divide between professional and participatory content that is nearly suffocating, etc.). They put links to Passport on individual game recap pages, giving the site maximum visibility across ESPN’s network of pages and fans multiple entry points to post their content. In fact, I ran across this while reading a Mizzou basketball recap; had I gone to the game and taken photos, I’m sure I would’ve been interested to post the photos to a site as well read as ESPN’s.

If you want to see an example, check out the “Were You There?” section on the Duke/North Carolina recap from Sunday’s game.

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I’ve been teaching a large lecture class this semester, my last one here at MU before I start at Lehigh in the fall. It seems like the lessons I’m learning as an instructor are much different than mid-size classes, and I’m not sure if it’s because a 200-student course means different challenges or if I’m just noticing issues more because the problems are being multiplied by 10.

I should preface anything here by saying I love being a teacher and enjoy being in the classroom. I know I’m not great at it yet, but I’ve learned a lot in six years of doing it and relish those moments where you feel like you’re breaking through with students and helping them develop as thinkers. A great question in class yesterday, for example, where a student on their own connected free speech issues to the Jena Six problem (showing curiosity and application) was one of those moments that gets you high.

Still, I’ve struggled with one part of the class, and that is enforcing standards. The students are required to do five participation events in the semester, which entails them going to an approved event (a lecture or civic meeting of some sort) and writing an essay that is pretty wide open in terms of format (personal reflection, recap, news style, etc.). The one thing we’re asking is the essay quotes someone who was at the event and that they list their contact information on the essay. We do this because we are verifying the students actually attended.

What we’re getting is a lot of essays with no contact info. Clearly the students aren’t reading the syllabus, which spells this one requirement (and really, the only standard for these things) out pretty plainly. This in itself is a problem, because it’s just plain bad to do work without looking at the instructions first. It’s even worse to turn it in without checking first to make sure you did it right according to the instructions.

Class policy is to give them a zero if they don’t do this right, because the contact information is vitally important to the assignment. Each essay is worth 2% of their overall grade, so that is a big deal. But of course I don’t want something like this to kill their grade, so the option I give them is to make it up by doing another event. Thus, a zero is not necessarily a zero forever.

What I’m running into is students who have complained that giving them a zero for missing “one small piece of information” is excessive or harsh. They don’t care about the lenience of letting them make it up because they already put work into the assignment they turned in. To them it’s about effort, not outcome.

I suppose in their view that could be true, but my explanation goes something like this:

1. You want to be employed someday.
2. The real-world has standards.
3. If you do not meet those standards, you will destroy your credibility as a journalist, lose accounts as a strat comm person, etc. No amount of effort will make up for the fact that the end product wasn’t up to snuff.
4. And it ain’t just media fields; I can’t think of an industry that doesn’t have standards as a centerpiece of judging quality work. So changing your major won’t help.
5. You might even be fired if you’re really bad at #3.
6. Therefore these standards are there to train you to read instructions before doing assignments or projects and make sure you’re doing it right. It’s not about this assignment, but rather your approach to any task laid before you.
7. Plus, this is not a zero for all time. You can make this up. I’m being sorta nice about it in the long run.
8. You might even thank me someday?

I’ve found some students get this chain of reasoning, while others are having a hard time seeing past that big fat (even if it’s temporary) zero on the grade book. Which I get; this is a generation that has been trained by the school system to treat an individual grade as the end-all-be-all thing that can RUIN THEIR LIFE FOR ALL TIME if they don’t perform. Education has become purely existential for some of them, and that’s a bad side effect of this country’s attitude toward learning. It’s why a few of them probably will rip me to shreds on teacher evaluations at the end of the term, so I’m prepared for that.

It is probably jarring for them to go from this educational reality they’ve known all their life to someone like me. My philosophy as educator is to help them take the long view and realize that the educational standards they have known are completely different than the standards of the real world, where time is money. A zero today can be helpful because it will train me to do better tomorrow, make me more employable and marketable. And it’s really good that I can not only learn my lesson but turn that zero back into full credit.

More to the point, I want to do this by not killing the good things that the education system has given them.

I’ve read research that describes this generation as more coddled than any other in U.S. history. While there might be merit to that, I tend to take the positive approach. This generation is more empowered than any other to see solutions that aren’t obvious and think creatively about problems. I see it in my interactions with them and it actually inspires me as a professor. My challenge, then, is to figure out a way to show them how to combine this sense of empowerment with what will be realistically be expected of them out there in the real world.

That, to me, is the purpose of education. Teach them what they need to know in order to survive, but let them keep the unique skills and world views that allow them to thrive.

Which is why I’m hard on them while showing some lenience at the same time by allowing them to redo the assignment. My first instinct is to wilt because I empathize with all of their struggles to get things done (and despite my exterior, I consider myself compassionate). But I can’t escape the thought that by completely backing down I would be doing them a disservice by inadvertently reinforcing the educational system’s message that standards don’t matter and that the final grade is all-important.

After all, I want them to be able to get and keep jobs someday. They can’t set the world on fire in their work if they can’t stay employed.

In the end, it’s a good philosophy but a struggle to enforce. You can see the use of standards actually hurting them, as if they’ve never had this happen before. I find myself constantly surprised by how much being a professor feels like being a parent, and that even when I’m not saying it I am thinking “this hurts me as much as it hurts you.”

I also find myself puzzled on this dichotomy between enforcing standards and not wanting to be a total hard ass to my students. The word “no” is such a necessary-yet-final word if you want to create standards, and there really isn’t any getting around it. And this is a generation that isn’t used to being told no, that they can’t do something. As I said before, this can be a positive thing because they see life without limits, but it can have its downsides.

These are good lessons, surprising lessons, as I embark on a life in the classroom. I have a lot of growth to do here, obviously, but appreciate any guidance on how others deal with it.

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We’re going through free speech stuff in JOUR 1100 this week, and Hans Meyer’s recent post about a court decision regarding free speech and the Net got me thinking a little bit.

I’d recommend reading the story and Hans’ post, because the combination of the two raise serious concerns about what happens when courts force site operators to release the names of contributors in cases of libel.

The thing I’m thinking about in the wake of this decision is that it’s really time for us to step back and think about what it means to associate online. This is really the heart of my dissertation, because we don’t think enough about what it means to talk together in online formats.

Sheer anonymity is seductive for the person who wants to spout off, but what does it really mean? As a reader, am I likely to trust what I’m reading when it’s coming from someone who won’t even take on a handle for the purpose of online discussion?

I’m almost at the point where I refuse to believe a person can be libeled by an anonymous poster. To really defame person, doesn’t it require credibility on the part of the speaker? Doesn’t the listener or viewer judge a message in the context of who is saying it, and generally discard (or at least be wary of it) it if they don’t trust the source?

Some of the things sites like Slashdot or DailyKos use, where you can rate a user’s post, are a partial solution. I like that communities can bury frothing idiots and anonymous cowards alike. Courts are giving too little credit to online users if they don’t think people can judge fact from anonymous rants. One thing I’ve learned by reading and doing gobs of research is that users are more sophisticated about this stuff than we want to think.

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