Recent grad school project by the brilliant Lindsey A. Britt. Great soundtrack. Didn't know she is into jazz.

``Stayed in Mississippi a day too long''

This is my review of David M. Oshinsky's `` `Worse Than Slavery:' Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice.'' Free Press Paperbacks, 1996. My final project for the Journalism 310 class, ``Western Press and the Third World'' taught by Nancy Muller at UMass/Amherst. Lots of really interesting material. Less a journalism course than a history of colonization.

Parchman Farm is legendary, and that is a problem. We can blame it on the blues. Folk song from the Mississippi River Delta made it known that Parchman was a bad, feared place where, for many able-bodied black men who had lived too long in Mississippi, serving time was a regional rite of passage. But the legend conveyed in blues and prison work songs recorded at Parchman don’t speak of Parchman’s roots. There is no explicit mention of the Reconstruction’s failure or the scientific racism that were the impetus for the farm’s creation.
In `` `Worse than Slavery:‘ Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow,’’1 David M. Oshinsky documents what can only be understood as a holocaust carried out, at first, on countless private labor/death camps -- farms, turpentine forests and mines -- throughout the south. Planting and harvesting cotton, building railroads and levies, the convicts suffered and died. The system put a far lower value on free black men than it did on slaves.
Mississippi eventually removed its penal agricultural system out of private hands and centered it on the 20,000-acre Parchman Farm, formally known as the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Although Mississippi took over a hugely profitable system of commodity production, the state proved unable to remedy the inhumanity that had plagued and eventually destroyed the system for private operators.
Not that they were especially interested in doing so. Oshinsky, the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin, documents the astonishingly thorough-going culture of violence in Mississippi, and the extremes to which, after emancipation, white planters in the South went to keep a plentiful supply of black laborers. With slavery dissolved, planters, racist government officials, all-white juries and commentators planted a system of internal colonization in its stead.
In 1868 one Edmund Richardson, who had made a fortune from stores and plantations, but who was ruined by the Civil War, convinced the authorities in Mississippi to lease him convicts to work land he had bought in the Yazoo Delta. The deal worked for Richardson and Mississippi. The state needed to relieve population pressure on its ``penitentiary overflowing with blacks;’’ Mississippi paid Richardson $18,000 a year to feed, clothe, house and transport the convicts; Richardson kept all the profits reaped from the convict’s toil.
With the pro-Reconstruction Republicans vanquished by the elections of 1875, the Democrats ``were fascinated by the potential of convict leasing. They knew that white taxpayers would never fund an expensive penitentiary, whatever their worries about crime.’’ They ``assumed that the profits generated by leasing would quiet any moral rumblings about the treatment of black criminals who were, after all, the dregs of an `inferior’ race.’’
Convict leasing buffered the shock of emancipation. It wasn’t just about profits and the dirty work. It served ``a cultural need by strengthening the walls of white supremacy as the South moved from an era of racial bondage to one of racial caste,’’ Oshinsky writes. ``In a region where dark skin and forced labor went hand in hand, leasing would become a functional replacement for slavery, a human bridge between the Old South and the New.’’
An effect of emancipation was a huge increase in the number of black prisoners throughout the South, in part because of the demise of paternalistic plantation-based law enforcement. If a slave committed a crime on the plantation, masters -- many of them hired private police forces -- had the problem settled privately, keeping the local police out of it. If a slave were arrested, the owner would often put up bail. But without this protection, more and more blacks ended up in the penal system. Oshinsky quotes this verse:

``They’ll arrest you and put you
In the Coahoma County jail,
Then you’ll want Mr. Doggett
To go your bail.
But since he’s dead
And can’t bail you out
Those cold iron bunks
Will wear your black ass out.’’

Blacks did commit serious crimes. ``Black Mississippians shot, stabbed, bludgeoned and killed one another with monotonous ease,’’ Oshinsky writes. But the legal system rarely protected blacks or convicted blacks who had victimized other blacks, so they found themselves with no choice but to administer justice themselves. And when there were too few convict laborers, the police would find them. ``When times were tight,’’ in Alabama, for example, ``local police would sweep the street for vagrants, drunks, and thieves.’’ They would be arrested, tried and sentenced to 60 or 90 days, and assessed court costs. Then they would be handed over to a state agent who leased them to coal mines. Oshinsky notes that during an average year, 97 percent of the convicts leased by Alabama counties -- serving two years or less for misdemeanors -- were black.
Edmund Richardson had promised Mississippi that he would the prisoners well, but the convict leasing system spread quickly through the south, and any notion of good treatment was disregarded. Before convict leasing officially ended, a generation of black prisoners would perish under conditions far worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves.
When the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad needed a malarial swamp drained, convicts, leased at $1.75 a day each, worked chained together for days in ``knee-deep pools of muck, `their thirst driving them to drink water in which they were compelled to deposit their excrement.’ ’’ A convict labor captain described men subleased to clear tropical marsh and palmetto jungle for a railway in Florida. ``There was no provision for shelter or supplies,‘’ the captain, one J.C. Powell, said. ``Rude huts were built of whatever material came to hand… I do not mean that there was some food or little food, but that there was no food at all. In this extremity, the convicts were driven to live as wild beasts, except that they were only allowed the briefest intervals from labor to scour the woods for food.‘’ Another testimony eerily recalls the brutal, hundreds-of-miles-long train passages that prisoners in Soviet Russia endured as they were shipped to mine gold for the state in the severely frozen gulags. During the winter of 1884, a group ``battered convicts’’ were transported by steamer, ``chained together, frost-bitten, and barely alive.’’ Their bodies were filthy and half naked, ``covered with blisters and scars.’’ Authorities in Vicksburg, Mississippi, would not allow the spectacle to be marched through town, so they had the men transported in covered wagons. They were being sent to Jackson, to a hospital ``where worn-out convicts were routinely sent to die.’’
The episode in Vicksburg exposed the system’s brutality, raising moral indignation and expressions of outrage, and prompting investigations. It turned out to be the beginning of the end of convict leasing.

Parchman Farm was established in 1904. There the convicts did agricultural work, but the system of leasing prisoners to private concerns had ended. Parchman was built largely at the prompting of James K. Vardaman, the notoriously racist governor of Mississippi. For years, Vardaman, affectionately know as ``the White Chief,’’ had opposed convict leasing. His public and private positions on the matter incorporated the myths about race that kept almost all blacks in menial labor, and helped him get elected.
Vardaman’s position was populist, Oshinsky notes. ``As a representative of poor whites,’’ Vardaman criticized the system because ``it enriched big planters and railroad barons at the public’s expense.’’ His private position was that the system victimized ``those least able to defend themselves.’’ Although Vardaman ``would spend a lifetime fighting to deny blacks political and social equality… he also believed that Negroes who accepted their lowly state in the human order should be protected from abuse.’’
But prisoners at Parchman were hardly protected from abuse, in large part because of the pervasiveness of the idea that blacks were, at best, fit for nothing higher than manual labor or, at worst, congenitally criminal. Pervasive throughout the South was the idea that blacks were inferior beings unable to control their sexual appetites. Although masters had conceived children with slaves for years, white southerners were terrified by the idea that their women would produce children with black men. The result would be nothing less than the degradation of the white race. Countless black men accused of either raping or having consensual relations with white women were subject to horrific lynching. Often they were burned to death. In general, Mississippi had a culture of violence that did not necessarily regard race. Oshinsky notes that an observer from London, ``one of England’s most raucous cities,’’ was amazed ``at the speed with which chance encounters and trivial slights escalated into grisly homicides. Even dinner conversations ``had a `smack of manslaughter about them.’ ’’ A people who were predisposed to violence would not be inclined to treat gently those whom they considered the criminal element of the inferior race.
The notion of black inferiority was fed by proponents of scientific racism, which was prevalent during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Vardaman was governor during the early development of eugenics in America. Eugenicists targeted people whom they considered ``unfit,’’ usually those who suffered from some sort of intellectual or social impairment, for sterilization. The point was to improve the human race by removing undesirable genes from the population. As signs of social undesirability, eugenicists cited social and biological influences, sometimes confusing them. Very often poverty was interpreted as criminal intent. Throughout the United States during the 1920s and ‘30s, untold numbers of ``feebleminded’’ persons were sterilized. The Third Reich’s social-policy end was preservation of the racial integrity of the Volk, and -- before the Holocaust -- eugenic sterilization was its means. The Nazis defined defectives as not only the developmentally and physically disabled, but also Jews, gays and lesbians, and communists.
In the South, commentators expounded theories to support the conclusion that, since emancipation, blacks had become more and more lazy and criminal. ``For years, white southerners had been complaining about the behavior of young blacks, born after the Civil War ended, who had never experienced the `civilizing’ effects of slavery,’’ Oshinksy writes. He quotes one Philip A. Bruce, ``a distinguished Virginia historian,’’ as saying that free blacks ``were `fast reverting’ to the `physical type’ and `original morals’ of their `primitive’ African roots.’’ Slavery had `` `provided restraints’’ on their criminality and sexuality. ``(T)he new generation, in being less accustomed to restraint than the old, are more inclined to act on their natural impulses,’’ Oshinsky quotes Bruce as saying. ``They are more headstrong than their immediate ancestors, and to that degree, have a more decided tendency to retrograde.’’
And, as did the Nazis, Mississippi used convicts in human medical experiments. Inmates were exposed to malaria and yellow fever, among other diseases. In the early part of the 20th century a pellagra epidemic broke out in south. Symptoms included severe back pain, listlessness, mental depression, a sore mouth, and a red gash on the hands, feet and face. No one knew what caused pellagra, but one Dr. Joseph Goldberger hypothesized that it might be brought on by the absence of dietary protein. He took the first step toward proving his hypothesis by adding protein to the diets in two orphanages that had been stricken by pellagra. Within a year the illness was almost entirely eradicated from the orphanages.
The second step was demonstrating that pellagra is, in fact, caused by a lack of protein. Goldberger got 12 Parchman inmates to agree to spend six months in isolation, eating nothing but fat-back meat, meal and molasses -- the staples of the poor people whom pellagra had hit the hardest. In return for their participation the convicts would be pardoned. Five of the prisoners became sick, and soon they were begging to be cured and sent back to the farm. Goldberger would not consider it. At the end of the experiment the prisoners recovered and, along with their pardons, received a new suit of clothes and five dollars. ``I have been through a thousand hells,’’ one said.
There was another parallel. In the camps, Nazis recruited inmate kapos who performed various tasks, including enforcement against their fellow prisoners. The Nazis often enticed inmates to become kapos by offering them reduced sentences or parole. (Very often kapos were killed anyway.) Likewise, Parchman used trustys, armed inmates who stood guard over their fellow inmates as they toiled. Usually a prisoner was chosen to be a trusty because he could intimidate inmates and had no qualms about using his rifle, if need be. ``Once chosen, a trusty became an unpaid member of the prison staff. He got better food and quarters than did the regular convicts, and did not have to stoop all day in the fields.’’ A trusty was allowed recreation and private visits with his wife, lover, or a prostitute brought in from town. For purposes of identification, trustys wore vertical stripes while the regular prisoners wore horizontal.

`` `Worse Than Slavery’ ‘’ is a wide-ranging book; it discusses the early history of Mississippi, the origin of Jim Crow, the sharecropping system and the imprisonment of Civil Rights-era Freedom Riders at Parchman. The profusion of descriptions of torture and gratuitous killing of prisoners and lynching makes reading ``Worse Than Slavery’’ gut-wrenching. Its greatest contribution is its argument that a vast decades-long holocaust occurred in the United States, a nation whose citizens usually look to World War II, or Cambodia, or Rwanda, for a reference to genocide.
The writing is excellent. An example of Oshinsky’s compassion for the convicts and his feel for the territory crops up in his discussion of the process prisoners went through to get paroled. He tells the story of John Randolph, who was paroled, after 13 years at Parchman, when the authorities decided he had been wrongly convicted of rape. As he walked away from Parchman, all Randolph had was the prison uniform he was wearing. Oshinsky writes, ``John Randolph had no clear destination and no one to call. He was last seen walking down the two-lane blacktop in the blazing Delta sun.’’
Oshinsky describes the course of the evolution of Parchman from a brutal agricultural penal colony to a modern, yet somehow soulless, walled institution. He quotes Horace Carter, who had been an inmate for nearly 50 years, as saying that the farm work had ``counted for something.’’ It had a rhythm that ``kept us tired and kept us together and made me feel better inside.’’

Alan Lomax, the great folklorist, pointed out that work songs, or ``hollers,’’ died out with gang labor. A refrain from a Parchman work song goes: ``It ain’t but the one thing I did wrong, I stayed in Miss’ippi a day too long.’’ 2 In the future a chant with that refrain could surface and make reference to Mississippi or any other place.

1. Oshinsky, David M., ``Worse Than Slavery:’’ Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1996

2. Lomax, Alan, The Land Where the Blues Began, New York: Dell Publishing, 1993, pg. 256

Absolutely Beautiful ``Sweet Home Chicago'' Video

The Return

So Slate.com is giving the disgraced former Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, a platform. I don’t have a problem with that. Just because someone has solicited a call girl does not mean that he or she has nothing still to offer. I say this in earnest; I am not being facetious.

And besides, I happen to agree with Spitzer’s opinion that bailouts of the “Big Three” automakers comprise bad policy. “(W)e are creating the significant systemic risk not just of rewarding imprudent behavior by private actors but of preventing, through bailouts and subsidies, the process of creative destruction that capitalism depends on.”
His prescription is a bit naive, however.
Spitzer says that the result of concentration of wealth is large companies involved in manufacturing and finance that, when they fail, take everyone else down.
But we knew that. The money that we are using on bailouts should instead be invested in creating a small-is-beautiful situation that would include big-time investments in research and education, “to restructure our bloated health care sector… to build the type of physical infrastructure we need to be competitive,” Spitzer says.
He wants to see us “return to an era of vibrant competition among multiple, smaller entities—none so essential to the entire structure that it is indispensable.”
Although I’m all for this, I see trouble down the road. The creation of this vibrancy is going to require regulation against companies becoming too big, and the Republicans are not going to go along with that. Waiting in the wings, eventually if not now, will be the next charismatic arch-conservative who will stage his or her own Reagan-style “revolution,” and vibrancy will be swept away. Greed is too profound a component of human nature to be mitigated for long.
Eras, after all, are temporary.
Of course there is the education that Spitzer would have us invest in. Education might stave off significantly the ignorance that embraces the powerful and blustering know-nothing and self-serving political ideologies. A significantly educated electorate just might stave off the return of the slinging of political crap.
That is, if the electorate is being taught history as well as in technology. The question: But history from which books? remains, and I don’t want to be the one who dictates what the masses shall learn.
Nevertheless things do change. We did elect an interracial man president.

A little voice of caution has entered my mind recently regarding Barack Obama, for whom I will vote on Tuesday. Deliberately failing to vote is unacceptable, and so I am interfaced with an electoral choice. (That of course is not the only choice we must make; whether we know it or not, we must choose whether or not to let other people dictate our diction. I would not use the word ``interface'' unless I was trying to have fun, which I was.)
Only individuals of great fortitude can't be corrupted by adulation. I'm not sure that Barack Obama is one of them. I've chosen him over John McCain, because McCain has left no doubt that he is a man of little principle. Time and time again during the campaign, McCain has misrepresented Obama's policy proposals; the idea is to employ the notion that if you repeat a lie often enough, people who first understood it to be a deception will begin to consider it to be the truth. This is his gambit to bring in the undecideds, the swing voters, whatever you want to call them.
The primary example is McCain's claim that Obama intends to ``spread the wealth.'' He lets Sarah Palin -- she has not repudiated the racism displayed at a rally she led this month -- label Obama, as a consequence, a socialist.
So, although there is a glow that surrounds Obama and that probably obscures our ability to get a clear vision of what President Obama's temperament and respect for accountability might be, we already know McCain's history of political inconsistency, his disregard for the truth, and his pugnaciousness. That's enough to drive me to Obama. Full disclosure requires me to say that I have never voted for a Republican -- I first voted for Kennedy over Carter in the 1980 primary -- I never considered voting for McCain, and have held Obama in high esteem. He is thoughtful and deliberative, and he seems to be a man of conviction.
McCain's tactic (did I get that right, John? Should I have called it a strategy instead?) to stigmatize Obama has worked on at least one individual, the obviously right-wing TV reporter who implied that Obama is a Marxist.
The Republicans have played up Obama's association with William Ayres, a former domestic terrorist who was a member of the Weather Underground. Then they hoped that repeating the loaded term ``spread the wealth,'' which Obama used with Joe the Plumber, would drop Obama. But after neither worked, they called him a socialist and now, as I said at least one TV reporter has implied that Obama is a Marxist. Yesterday, Fox News ran an investigation of Obama's affinity for Marxism and associations with Marxists. But Fox News never answered these questions: Even if Obama is a Marxist, so what? What would this mean, in concrete terms, for Obama's policy initiatives? What would be the consequences? And is a revision of the tax code necessarily Marxist? Could it be when accomplished by way of a democratic process? Does Fox News fear that Obama would have the audacity and employ the stupidity required to attempt to change the code by executive order?
Would Obama promulgate about covert acts of domestic violence?
And has it ever been a good idea to have such a percentage of wealth controlled by a small percentage of the citizenry? (I think I know how the powers that be at Fox might answer that one.)
The right would never have bothered to call Barack socialist or Marxist, never would we have been reminded of Bill Ayers, if the electoral polls had not consistently and heavily favored Obama. The Republicans don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. At this time I would not bet that Obama will be elected, but I would bet on him with less worry that I would lose my shirt than I would on John McCain.

SARASOTA, Fla. -- During my stay at my parents' home here I watched the Red Sox lose their chance to repeat in the World Series. After game six, TBS broadcast the faces and body language of crestfallen and tearful Tampa Bay Rays fans. They looked like their team had lost the series, that there was no tomorow, no last chance.

Given their last chance the next night, Tampa Bay beat the Sox, which didn't surprise me at all. I was surprised that the Red Sox had managed to push the series out to seven games -- the Sox had fared so poorly against the Rays in the regular season.

After game seven I was neither crestfallen nor tearful. I had been expecting the Red Sox to lose for a long time.

Teams rarely repeat. History is against them.

As I went to bed I just couldn't feel bad about the defeat. After all, I knew perfectly well that I had not been defeated. For the most part I felt serene, unexpectantly satisfied, only a little empty.

Two days later, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune ran this a Boston Globe editorial:

``[W]e New Englanders can afford to be magnanimous. We have our memories of
October glory, and they are fresh; they are not shrouded in the mists of time that separate living generations from folks who were around in 1918, before Babe Ruth absconded to the Bronx... With only the tiniest tremor of regret, Sox fans may now salute the youth and brio of the Tampa Bay team.''

That was what I felt. A tiny tremor of regret.
But the day before the paper reprinted from the Globe, the Herald-Tribune, as its lead story on the Rays' triumph, ran this from columnist Doug Fernandes. It read in part:`

Ding dong, the witch is dead.
It was destroyed Sunday night, reduced to the harmless title of ex-world champions by a team that didn't choke, didn't gag, didn't clutch.
No Heimlich required. Just a one-way ticket back to Boston for the dethroned Red Sox.''

No magnaminity there. Fernandes make it sound as though the Sox and the Rays had developed a bitter ages-old rivalry. The Herald-Tribune could have used an editorial cooling period, which could only doubtfully be afforded by the tight deadline Fernandes was working under.
Either that, or, before the series, the paper should have instituted an editorial policy mandating temperance.

Stuck

SARASOTA, Fla. -- I was stranded in the airport in Atlanta Oct. 17 when CNN, avoidable on the airport concourse but ignored only with great effort at the gate, reported on the racist invective directed at Sen. Barack Obama at a Sarah Palin rally in Johnstown, Penn. a week earlier.
I was traveling alone to Florida, stuck in an unplanned seven-hour layover, killing time reading and watching TV. Except to trade acerbic comments about the airline's ineptitude for keeping us so long, I didn't converse with anyone.

The noise in the terminal drowned out CNN's audio so I couldn't get a sense of why the network was running the week-old footage of the smug bastard son of a bitch brandishing a stuffed-animal Curious Gerorge with an Obama bumper sticker for a hat. The report then used video having to do with the recent placement of Ku Klux Klan flyers on Sunday papers.


I concluded that CNN's angle must have been the Obama Campaign and Racism in America. That is based on what I saw. As I said, I couldn't hear the report. Therefore I got no answer to my question: Had Palin had repudiated the anti-Obama hecklers? As of today I could not find a news account to that effect through Google.

Facing me across the aisle of chairs was an older African-American couple. I put more value on their response to the TV story than on mine. I'm white and they're black; the video referred more directly than it did mine because they are the descendants of slaves, and I am not.

I glanced furtively at them. I saw enough of their response so that I could turn my eyes away before my eyes and theirs met.

I've lived in Massachusetts for 45 years and never in the South. If, during my brief time in the South -- vacations in New Orleans in 1996 and '97, and overnight stays in Virginia and North Carolina -- I had confronted the topic of racism, even in a brief glancing moment, to acknowledge with black person there, I would never have forgotten that encounter.


Of course I don't know what was in the couple's heads as they watched CNN at that moment. They shook their heads -- perhaps in amazement. I was puzzled that they didn't seem at all angry. I hope they did not feel resignation, but they might have.

Because I did not talk to them I never learned where they are from. I couldn't hear them. I was unable to listen for accents that would have allowed for at least a guess.
I was as able to do anything about the situation as I was able to bring Flight 5716 to Sarasota to the gate.

Despite the static and the fading signals broadcast from his father's CB radio, John Moe heard enough to know ``the trucks were out there.''

He was fascinated, ``hearing the lonely truckers talk to each other. It made me feel less lonely, somehow...''

Moe transmitted his remarks, and the images they evoke, in a commentary on ``Weekend America,'' an American Public Radio program he hosts. The year was 2008. The month and day: 10/4.

Truck drivers identified themselves with ``handles'' such as Big Ben or Rubber Duck -- used by C.W. McCall in his 1975 novelty tune, ``Convoy''. That way the information on who was doing the talking remained privileged.

I don't remember anyone using describing Citizen Band radio as interactive, the word we use now instead of two-way, although it was. (Another two-way invention, amateur or ham radio, caught on in the early 20th century.)

``We've ditched the CB, but its ghost entered our iPhone or Blackberry,'' Moe said.

``Instead of handles we have user names, which are never our real names.''

This summer, the American Journalism Review published a piece on how National Public Radio is begging to be renamed National Public Portals. Although the AJR doesn't say that -- I made it up -- the journal quotes executives as saying they are emphasizing the improvement of NPR's on-line service
But the emphasis on getting the news outlets to publish in multiple formats may just require too much work. Reporters at NPR, and elsewhere, are complaining.
With $1.5 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and $1 million of its own money, NPR is training its 450 editorial employees ``in digital storytelling skills and to pay for substitutes to fill in for them while they learn,'' AJR reports.
Which means that NPR has been training its reporters with little or no Web learning in Flash multimedia software and the Premiere video editing program. They learn basic photography and videography and ``(create) one multimedia project per week,'' AJR reports. They have been trained in using NPR's content management program and search engine optimization, AJR reports.
The AJR quotes Dick Meyer, NPR Digital Media editorial director, as saying he understands if some staff feel uncomfortable with the tasks of getting videos and writing for the Web.

``We're not insisting that everybody become a multimedia artist.''

For now. In general, however, it is the highly skilled and versatile workers that employers choose to retain and reward.
Editors don't stick around forever. Down the road a new editorial regime that would not be so forgiving or even tolerant of non-multimedia artists could emerge at NPR. Communications technology is not the only thing that changes.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same. Journalists who choose to go multi-media are putting in a lot of unpaid hours. The AJR quotes Art Silverman, a senior producer of ``All Things Considered,'' as saying:

"For this to work, it must be clear how the time is supposed to be spent. It's not really clear now. People get praised for creating multimedia. If Miss X did a slide show or if someone else did a written story for the Web, they get a lot of praise. But when you drill down, and ask, 'How did you fit that in?' they say, 'Oh, I did it on my own time and stayed up late at night finishing it.' In order to get the attention one must tear oneself out of the day and do extra work. Time is often not allotted to do these things."
Neda Ulaby, arts and culture reporter, is quoted as saying she's glad that management is getting the training.

"It helps them realize how much time the assignment is going to take...'' If they want a picture, "they've got to know that it will take me an hour because I'm still not a trained photographer. I'm now a radio person who can take a picture better than your average schlump."

Two years ago today, ``All Things Considered'' ran a story about a Nashville TV station that was trying to retrain all of its reporters to become ``video journalists.'' Reporters and camera operators were required to do all the tasks involved in producing a TV story -- editing, writing, reporting and filming.
Al Devine, a veteran cameraman, said:

"It was a nightmare... All of a sudden, you had to use a whole different side of your brain. I wasn't a writer. I could edit. I could do most everything else. But I wasn't a writer. I still type like a pumpkin."

Last year, Mother Jones reported on the Tribune Co.'s new mandate that print journalists also
report breaking stories on its cable station.

``Many reporters were anxious about the new arrangement, which meant more work without more pay, and less time to do their regular jobs. They weren't comforted when managers announced that they were remodeling the newsroom to put a television studio directly outside the editor-in-chief's door. These reporters recognized that technology was changing their industry, and most were eager to learn new digital skills and make the occasional TV appearance. Their main concern was that as `content providers,' they were losing time for reporting, thinking, and writing—the essential ingredients of their craft—forcing them to churn out increasingly dumbed-down articles.''

``Content providers.'' Gack...
Mother Jones reported this quote from an editor-in-chief, which appeared in the American Journalism Review in 1998:

"I am not the editor of a newspaper. I am the manager of a content company."

          Did the editor say that with a smile on his face?