I blame my subscription to Mother Jones. It’s a kick-ass investigative journalism magazine, but let’s face it: the subscriber demographics skew liberal.

Therefore I occasionally get political mail. Sometimes it’s kind of hilarious. That’s the nature of political mail—it’s old fashioned propaganda designed to get you to donate money to a candidate. Much like the fake telephone surveys where political campaigns will ask you “How would you feel if Senator So-and-So was a serial rapist?” The Senator isn’t actually a serial rapist, but the questioning is designed to put that idea into your head.

The cynic in me loves the political scheming. Adores it. Wants to take it behind the elementary school and get it pregnant.

Cut to today’s mail: a letter from “James Carville” via the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. I’m not sure if Carville did indeed write this letter. Probably someone on his payroll.

The envelope reads: “It’s Sarah Palin’s Tea Party NOW … DETAILS INSIDE.” There’s also a picture of Palin growling in Mama Grizzly fashion.

This Mama Grizzly knows how to growl.

Some choice tidbits of the letter (will provide full text upon request, if you’re really that interested):

• “I’ve been in politics for a long time, and here’s what I know about 2010: Sarah Palin’s summer of lies road trip is in full swing.” [Ed. note: Bold is original to letter]
• “Sarah’s already campaigned for more than a dozen tea party lunatics…”
• “She’s [Sarah Palin] doing a bang-up job of stirring up the crazy.”
• “You can stop this radical threat…”

Also included is “Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Primer,” which includes five of her Democratic targets (Photos in the gallery).

The overall message: Crazy Sarah Palin wants to make all of Congress crazy. She’s out to get you sensible and intelligent Democrats! DONATE NOW OR WE ALL SHALL PERISH!

Ok, so perhaps it’s not that histrionic. There’s nothing related to Armageddon.

Although if you ask me, that would make for a much more effective mailer.

NCAA qualifiers continued…

The reactions around the web have been colorful about the two football players denied admission to SMU.

• “This is an injustice.” [University Diaries]
• Hall exploring options for his future — BHS grad could play football and baseball after being denied admission to SMU [Brenham Banner-Press]
• The PonyFans Recruitment Board also has some interesting threads.

Congratulations are in order for Meadows Dean José Bowen

Dallas Historical Society announces recipients of 2010 Awards for Excellence in Community Service [Dallas Morning News]:

Jose Antonio Bowen (arts leadership): The dean of the Meadows School of the Arts since 2006, Bowen has brought bold, dynamic leadership to the school and to the arts in Dallas.

Photo Source

SMU can be pretty newsworthy. Here’s where you can catch up on the important SMU news of the day.

The Gulf Project

SMU is teaming up with “a coalition of scientists, policy experts, oil and gas engineers and state officials” in an attempt to make offshore drilling safer—thus preventing future oil spills.

Gov. Rick Perry created the task force, which the Houston Chronicle has him describing as “a Texas version of that legendary race to the moon.”

(Ed. note: No, I don’t really get the metaphor either. What are you trying to say, Rick Perry? How does a race to get a man on the moon compare to creating safer offshore drilling environments? The race to get the most oil?)

• SMU researchers to help in Gulf Project [Dallas Business Journal]
• SMU Part of Governor’s Offshore Drilling Think Tank [KERA]
• Tech to study Gulf oil spill [Lubbock Avalanche-Journal]

Video Game Sales

A study conducted by the Guildhall at SMU and EEDAR found that reviews of a game, such as one published by a newspaper, influence the sales of that game. The study found “a strong causal link between professional critic reviews and their ability to affect consumers’ actions and perceptions.”

• The Guildhall at SMU and EEDAR Study Influence of Professional Review Critics [IGN]
• Research Shows Game Reviews Influence Sales [Gaming Union]
• Study suggests review scores affect player opinion of games [Network World]
• Study: Review Scores Do Matter [IGN]

Sports

SMU denies a second NCAA qualifier [Dallas Morning News]

The first painting to get loaned to SMU from the Prado.

I used to round up links for my EIC blog (before I apparently forgot how to post to it). I figure this could be a good thing to do on this blog, since I’m still getting Google Alerts about SMU. I can’t wait for graduation and the day I can turn them off. So without further ado, here’s what you should know in recent SMU news:

Donald Andrew Bess is on trial for the murder of an SMU student in 1984:

• Dallas County death penalty trial delayed after defendant accused of killing SMU student has massive heart attack [Dallas Morning News]
• Defendant’s heart attack delays SMU murder trial [Associated Press]
• Rapist was also SMU student’s killer in ’84 slaying, two testify [Dallas Morning News]
• Dallas County prosecution rests in trial over killing of SMU student in ’84 [Dallas Morning News]

SMU Research is trying to help women practice assertiveness skills with virtual reality so that they can prevent rape (Editor’s note: But what we really need to be doing is teaching people to not rape other people. I mean, that’s the problem with our rape culture. But I digress.): Practicing assertiveness skills on virtual-reality “dates” may help women prevent sexual victimization [SMU Research]

The Meadows Museum announced a three-year partnership with the Prado Museum, which further cements the Meadows Museum’s association with Spanish Art:

• Meadows ties the knot with the Prado [Daily Campus]
• Prado and Meadows Museum announce three-year partnership [SMU Public Affairs]
• Prado and Meadows Museum Announce Three-Year Partnership [Dallas Art News]
• Prado has U.S. alliance [New York Times]

Summer Senate doled out approximately $5,400 to various organizations at their first Summer Senate meeting.

Sports News:

Conference realignment could mean a big shakeup for SMU Athletics. Right now, all we’ve got is speculation.

• How does conference movement affect SMU?_updated with Orsini statement [Dallas Morning News]
• C-USA hires consultant to assist as conference realignment unfolds [Dallas Morning News]

The NCAA sanctioned USC for a host of violations, bringing up memories of the Death Penalty and the death of SMU Football. Naturally. Sometimes I think SMU is the Jennifer Anniston to the NCAA’s sanctions’ Brad Pitt. No matter what the story, we’re going to be brought up:

• NCAA Slaps U. of Southern California With Stiff Penalties in Closely Watched Case [Chronicle of Higher Education]
• USC Football: Sanctions Worst Since SMU Death Penalty? [Bleacher Report]
• USC Trojans: They’re Different From 1980s SMU How, Exactly? [Houston Press]

Former SMU Director of Athletics Jim Copeland dies at the age of 65 from cancer: [SMU Public Affairs]

That's an epic fail.

Just because you never run corrections doesn’t mean you’re never wrong.

I was talking to Craig Flournoy, one of my journalism professors, one day last April when he said something to that effect. The Daily Campus had just run a correction recently, and he was telling me that we, the paper, were doing the right thing by publishing corrections.

And you know what? He’s absolutely right.

By their very nature, humans make a lot of mistakes. We’ve got the sheepish apology and “I’m only human” line down. You’d think journalistic institutions would realize this and admit their erroneous ways. Some do. Others don’t.

In an old post (but worth the read), Scott Rosenberg of MediaBugs.org highlights one of the reasons why corrections are important, focusing on two New York Times corrections of Voxox (originally reported as “Vovox”) and the College of William & Mary (originally printed as “William and Mary College”):

the importance of correcting them lies not in some earth-shattering import to the facts themselves but rather in the bond of trust that is established when a publication is seen to care enough to correct them — and, inversely, the loss of trust that occurs when the publication doesn’t bother.

Remember that, for Joe at Voxox or Sue at William & Mary, the misspelled name isn’t just a tiny fact in a sea of information; it represents that person’s point of maximum contact with the publication. Each time these people think of that newspaper or magazine they’re going to remember, These are the folks who couldn’t even get my name right. Multiply that by all the careless errors that get made in the course of normal journalism and you can get some insight into why public trust in the media has been on a downhill curve for so many years.

Issuing a correction is painful and gives me a queasy stomach. I absolutely hate doing it. Because as a journalist, I’m supposed to get the facts straight. The paper is supposed to get the facts straight. We’re the first draft of history!

Running a correction is something of a Catch-22: Either we admit that we were wrong or we don’t. Admitting mistakes shows our readers that we make mistakes and aren’t fully accurate. Not admitting mistakes shows that a) we’re too stupid to know we made a mistake, b) we don’t care about making mistakes, or c) we don’t want to make ourselves look bad. The only way out of these situations is to admit wrongdoing. To do so otherwise is a disservice to journalism.

The 2009 State of the Media report by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that fewer and fewer Americans trust the media because we’re less accurate. We can’t just pretend the mistake never happened. Why not? Because our readers know if we get something wrong. There’s always going to be at least one guy who reads a story and notices that something’s wrong. And that one guy will inevitably tell someone else about the error. It spreads like a virus. They know we got something wrong, so why should they trust us?

Then there’s the other side of errors: spreading misinformation. Just ask Mark Twain, who is probably one of the most quoted people who ever lived. Or Marie Antoinette, who never did actually say, “Let them eat cake.” If we don’t correct our wrongs, some people might not realize we were wrong. This, I believe, is the single most important reason why we should correct mistakes. Not everyone is a fact-checker. It’s why birthers believe that Obama is not an American citizen (that, and a healthy dose of conspiracy theory). News outlets are supposed to be credible (because we’re all about facts), which means a lot of people take our information and assume its true. Even sometimes when it’s not.

If we don’t correct the information when we know it’s wrong, we’re lying to our readers. We’re intentionally saying the facts don’t matter. And in journalism, that’s akin to blasphemy.

Having been raised in East Texas, I can tell you that there are some people whose accent is thick enough to make "owl" sound like "I'll."

It’s three o’ clock in the morning (approximately), and I’m staring at the glow of my laptop’s monitor. The only sounds I hear are the gently clacking of my keyboard and the humming of the window A/C unit. I can’t hear the usual chaos of the busy street below—mostly because it’s quite empty.

I do this a lot.

The Big Guy Upstairs Does Not Apparently Want to Grant My Wishes

If I could change one thing about myself, it would probably be my night-owl tendencies. I’ve always wanted to be one of those morning people who can wake up at the crack of dawn, sit at the breakfast table and read the morning paper. Morning people always seem to be more productive than normal. Perhaps it’s because when I wake up, I spend the first five minutes trying to figure out how much longer I can sleep without being late to whatever I’m waking up for. I seem to always be staying up later than I probably should, doing mindless activities to forestall going to sleep. My brain acts like a stubborn six-year-old. And the worst part of it all is the fact that I actually love sleeping. Sleeping is God’s gift to mankind, rivaled only by sliced bread and a Christopher Buckley novel.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP… (Or, a Typical Day)

6 a.m.: The alarm goes off three hours before whatever it is I’m waking up for (class, meeting, work, etc.). The alarm clock is designed after the old wind-up alarm clocks that reigned before the advent of the clock radio. The ringing is loud enough to roust a corpse from its eternal slumber.

6:01 a.m.: The ding-donger between the two bells must be stopped before the alarm is turned off because otherwise it will keep ringing as I fumble around for the off switch. The small hammer is contained. The switch is flipped.

6:02 a.m.: It’s 6. That means… I can sleep for another hour at least. Wait—I showered last night. That means another thirty minutes. Right? Right.

6:02 and 1/2 a.m.: Reset alarm for 7:30 a.m. Go back to sleep.

7:30 a.m.: Alarm jolts to life. Hammer must be stopped. Alarm switched off.

7:31 a.m.: I really don’t have to leave until 8:30. And it’ll take less than half-an-hour to get ready. I can sleep some more. Huzzah!

7:31 a.m.: Reset alarm for 8 a.m. Go back to sleep.

8 a.m.: Alarm. Off. Up. Day Begins. Unless, of course, I don’t set my alarm at 7:31, figuring I’ll rest my eyes for 10 minutes or so. Murphy’s Law states that I’ll then accidentally fall asleep and wake up with the minimum time needed to get going or worse.

Meanwhile, across town some girl named Margaret did indeed wake up at 6 when her alarm first went off (in fact, she woke up before it went off and waited to get out of bed until she heard it ringing). Margaret managed to scrounge up a delicious breakfast meal while I was busy sleeping in. She caught up on news and did some laundry in the process. She’s a pretty productive person who keeps a garden out back and a Julia Child cookbook on the kitchen counter.

Sometimes I hate Margaret. Then I feel bad about hating her. It’s not her fault I’m not a morning person.

The reason I’m not Margaret is because my night-owl tendencies are exaggerated by a) my job and b) my being a college student. Invariably I would always end up staying up late to put the print product to bed. All the while stupidly signing up for morning classes (but then again, why is it that the one class you need is always at the one time you don’t want it to be?).

My schedule is completely out of whack. If I could normalize my sleeping patterns, my inner Margaret could come out. But it only takes one night to throw everything off-kilter again. Inner Margaret sure is a petulant kid.

Any advice? I’d love to hear it. How do all of you night owls deal with morning? And morning people, what’s the deal? How can I join your super-awesome club?

For starters, I changed my header. Now you’ll notice the lovely cursive scrawl across the top. The “S” is a little weird, I realize. But then again, you’d need to know my name to spell out the URL. So what’s the harm?

I’ve also added separate pages for my portfolio—of which I will continue to update in the future:

• Writing will contain samples of my writing and links to find all of my work.
• Design will contain samples of layouts I created. This one will be updated as soon as I can get back to Dallas and the DC newsroom, where old PDFs are stored (since College Publisher ate our pre-2010 PDFs in the update).
• Multimedia will contain examples of random interactive, video, web stuff. It’s mostly a catch-all (but isn’t that what the “multi” part of the word means?).

But, as always, I am still keeping alive my project for the CHS class of 2007. We’re almost near our five-year mark (can you believe it?). My blog posts remain on the homepage.

After several weeks with the new blog theme, I must say it’s still got that brand-new-theme smell. Kudos to the designers who’ve made the Internet a better place aesthetically.

This is somewhat depressing because unless I either a) become a famous author (my journalism career having gone to pot and all) who doesn’t have a set work schedule or b) marry an uber-rich European monarch (or equally-rich software/computer tycoon) and officially start using the word “summer” as a verb, this is the last time before retirement that I’ll ever be able to laze about.

The worst part is that I’m not lazing about at all for most of it. I’ll be taking a few summer classes and probably getting a job to earn a little extra money. That epic roadtrip across America will have to wait until I’m 89 and can finally afford that Winnebago (I’ll nickname it “Ralph”).

But I’m also a little excited, because this means soon I won’t be in school anymore. Sure, there’s going to be a lot more responsibility… and loans that need paying. But I like the idea of a world where I don’t have to constantly take tests and keep up with grades. That gets tiring.

Said bookmark. On a side note, isn't the new theme just exquisitely designed?

Five days ago, you could say I committed the gravest of social media sins by deleting my Facebook account.

I have yet to fully acclimate to my new, non-Facebook life.

For instance, if my Google Reader should run dry and my Twitter feed update slowly, I’m tempted to click on that Facebook bookmark. I want to click on it. The mouse goes to it, like a ship’s crew to the sound of a siren’s song.

Then I remember I deleted my account, and it all comes back to me.

Even though my use had decreased considerably, Facebook was a great way to pass the time. Facebook’s Statistics provide a staggering glimpse of the truly horrendous time suck that it actually is: “People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook.” I believe that’s all 400 million users. Divide out that number and you get a lot of time spent on one website.

Bored and nothing to read? Go read random Facebook status updates. Of course, most of the updates were mundane items that really didn’t add anything to my life. Instead of catching up on world affairs, I was reading passive-aggressive song lyrics and “Johnny likes rubber duckies, Madonna and Sports Illustrated.” This is one of the reasons I enjoy Twitter—many of the people I follow tweet interesting links to news and random tidbits of information that I would otherwise not find.

So far, I have received one email asking me what happened to my Facebook. The sender is not on Twitter, so they wouldn’t have known. Otherwise, not much activity on that front.

Not having an account has also made it difficult to look at specific pages on Facebook. This is what I fear will draw me to create a dummy account to view these pages. It’s why I haven’t deleted that bookmark. And it’s precisely because I haven’t deleted that bookmark that I keep gravitating to click on the link. In terms of my eye movements, it always goes first to my SMU email and then to Facebook. It’s a habit.

I need to rearrange my bookmarks. Or just delete the one in question. Because I know I made the right decision in deleting my Facebook.

Although perhaps going cold turkey wasn’t the best idea.

College Media Matters | Student journalist? Casual observer of student media? Then this blog is worth a look. Recently they examined SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan’s stint at her college newspaper.

Dallas Dirt | Perhaps you don’t live in Dallas at all. Perhaps you do. But this blog is great at featuring historic homes and other architectural porn. Just ignore the realtor-esque sales pitches.

Frontburner | Another blog from D Magazine. This one’s great for Dallas news. If you live in Dallas, then you should be reading it.

Hipster Puppies | A novel and hilarious concept.

Hyperbole and a Half | A very witty blog featuring hand-drawn images created by using the Mac equivalent of MS Paint. If you’re not laughing up a gut while reading the fish story, then I really don’t see how you could ever have a sense of humor.

Letterheady | I love stationery. Therefore all of this letterhead fascinates me. Want to see what Harry Houdini used as his letterhead? It’s on there. So is Tesla’s. And DC Comics. And a host of others.

Unfair Park | Another fantastic Dallas news blog.

Overheard in the Newsroom | Quote-worthy moments from newsrooms across the country. My favorite? “Editor: “Multiple exclamation points are a sign of a diseased mind.”

In the Pink | Funny. Snarky. Liberal. Newsy. Blog. About. Everything.