DeRusha

Congrats to Taylor!

mediation:

I’ll save my acceptance speech for later, but for now let me thank some people.  

First let me thank the people who donated to the Holiday Fund Drive:

Rex Sorgatz 

Jason DeRusha

Colin Kloecker

And let me also thank everyone who make this blog possible, including the primary and secondary sources online and in real life.  Tomorrow I’ll thank you all by name, but for tonight, you make this link blog happen.  

Testing this.

Test of Embed

New RSS Feed for DeRusha Blog

WCCO Has jumped into the blogging revolution with a REAL BLOG!  Yes, you can comment, trackback, etc.  Go to wcco.com/jasonblog to check it out.

And the new RSS Feed is: http://cbslocalblogs.prospero.com/dir-app/acx/ActiveContent.aspx?type=blog&fmt=rss&webtag=wcco_jasonblog

Bloggers Up In Arms; Shelby Off the Air; And My Error of Omission

Ugh. What a busy day. Between responding to a raging on-line discussion about a forum on New Media Ethics (including the flattering commentary of Chuck Olsen where he called me “our generation’s Dave Moore”) and trying to get tonight’s Good Question on the air, I haven’t had a second to breathe!

A couple notes. Don Shelby’s been off the air for a couple nights, he explains a bit about it when he called into his own radio show today. I’ll be filling in on WCCO from 3-6 p.m. Wednesday, so listen in. We’ll take calls.

In today’s Good Question video e-mail, I take you into our Good Question morning meeting. I failed to convey the reality that we sort through 60-80 e-mails every day, to help us decide what we cover. I believe tomorrow we’re doing one of your Good Questions. Some of the questions come from inside the newsroom, some come from outside. I’m interested in upping the amount of questions that come from outside… so I’ll keep pushing for that! (As long as you keep sending in good questions.)

And many of you e-mailed in response to last night’s story on men versus women drivers. The point was repeatedly raised that men drive more, and so it follows that men get in more crashes. This is true. However, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, men die in fatal crashes at a rate of 2.5/100,000,000 miles driven; Females die at 1.7/100,000,000 miles driven. So when you strip out the differences in miles driven, men do die more often in crashes. It’s just not as dramatic as the numbers I used seemed to suggest. Of course, in the story, I thought we made it clear that there is no great answer to the question, as it’s hard to really isolate the issue to a male/female variable.

But for some of you, I missed the mark, and I certainly should have used the deaths per hundred-million miles stat, so sorry about that. And thanks for writing to share your thoughts. Oh, and “Why are your stories always so thin in factual information?” is not going to make air as a Good Question segment, but thanks for trying.

The Homosexual Lisp: Is it Real?

Last Thursday I did a story on accents and where they come from. While I was looking into the story, a friend of mine asked about the stereotypical “lisp” that is often associated with homosexual males.

Benjamin Munson is a professor at the University of Minnestoa, who’s extensively studied sexual preference and speech. So I shot the question off to him, and he gave an unbelievably detailed and interesting response. It was far too much to include in the broader story on accents, but I thought I’d share some of his comments here. If you’d like to read his entire response, he’s put it on his blog.

“Do gay men lisp, in the sense of producing misarticulated “s” sounds? The short answer is No. The long answer is even more interesting.

At least three studies report that the characteristics of “s” in some self identified gay men is in the opposite direction of what we would expect if the these talkers were producing a ‘lisped’ “s.” They were actually closer to the productions of a hyper-correct, carefully produced “s”. Let’s call this “clear s”. These production patterns are not the inevitable consequence of a person’s self-stated sexuality. Though there is a stronger tendency for gay-identified men to produce the “clear s” variant than heterosexual men, some gay-identified men don’t produce this variant, and some heterosexual men do.

Maybe the “lisp” stereotype arose as part of a broader popular-culture belief that gay men were somehow weaker, more ineffectual, and child-like—after all, children lisp. We can find some evidence for it by looking at portrayals of gay men in film, particularly in the middle of the last century. Gay male characters were often portrayed as weak and ineffective. Part of this portrayal was often a lisp. Perhaps the lisp was intended as a cue to the audience that they should view the character as child-like and weak. I emphasize that this is just one conjecture about the origin of this stereotype.”

Ben continued with a thought that really applies to why Minnesotans have a similar accent, why Bostonians speak the same, frankly, why any group starts to sound similar to each other:

Some groups can use one particular variety of a sound to show—either intentionally or unintentionally—that they are members of a particular social group, and another group can use a different variant. The question of sexuality and “s” isn’t unique here.

Interesting stuff, and something to think about over the weekend. Thanks Ben.

Note to Governor: Lay off The Coffee

As I drove in to work this morning, I was listening to “Good Morning Minnesota”, the Governor’s radio program on WCCO-AM. All the sudden, the show went off the air. It had to be silent for about 3 to 4 minutes. Then it popped back in, and 10 minutes later, the Governor said he spilled coffee on a console in the radio station, and he wasn’t able to take phone calls any more.

Reporter Sue Turner just confirmed to me that in fact, the Governor did spill coffee (it wasn’t a radio bit). But the coffee not only messed up the phone system, the coffee spill knocked the Governor’s show right off the air.

Awesome. Just awesome. When I worked in radio in Milwaukee (at Soft Favorites, the new 103. 7), I knocked our radio station off the air several times, while trying to take transmitter readings (the up button advanced the digital readout, the down button powered down the transmitter). But coffee? Spilled coffee? Perfect.

(reposted from WCCO DeBlog)

How The McCain Story Blew Up: Good Question

At the heart of tonight’s Good Question is an issue of blame. Who is to blame for focusing the dialogue on sex and scandal? The media or the public? Jane Kirtley told me today: “If the public really weren’t interested in that, I can pretty much guarantee the media would not be pursuing that line of inquiry.”

You should judge for yourself:

Read the original New York Times story.

Here’s the Washington Post story, which originally didn’t mention any insinuation of an affair.

The Columbia Journalism Review has 5 questions for the NYTimes.

There’s some speculation that the reason the New York Times published today, is that they knew The New Republic was going to run this story on why the NY Times was holding the McCain story.

Locally, Brian Lambert blogs about the McMania.

And for those fascinated by journalism, thePoytner Institute has posted resources for journalists covering the story.

E-mail me your thoughts, I’ll share some of them here tomorrow.

(Repost from DeBlog) 

Twitter For Breaking News

This morning while I was trying to line up tonight’s Good Question expert, I logged onto Twitter, where a friend had posted about breaking news, a fire in downtown Minneapolis.

He thought KARE was live streaming pictures of the fire. I pointed him to the WCCO.com livestream (we’re pretty aggressive about getting live breaking news on the Web). He then wrote this suggesting we have an emergency breaking news feed on Twitter.

Greg asked, we responded. You can follow WCCOBreaking on Twitter here. We’re just starting it, so it’ll be an experiment of sorts. But we’ll send out alerts there when there’s big stuff going on, so you can come over to the website to see what’s happening.

CNN has a similar Twitter feed, I find it helpful. They only send out alerts when it’s really important, so they don’t overwhelm me with dumb alerts. Not to pump up my own employer, but our general manager here is pretty smart about television just being one platform for us to distribute our message. So I like that we’re experimenting with different things.

Hey, one bonus of being on Twitter and following me: I often post our Good Question topics there, looking for people who might want to share thoughts. And those comments make it into TV stories. So it’s another way for your voice to be heard.