The city: history, names and monuments

I’ve thought many times that the name ‘Volgograd’ probably means nothing to foreigners. They only know the city of ‘Stalingrad’, insofar as the Battle of Stalingrad is mentioned in history textbooks as one of the turning points of the Second World War. Some are even surprised, when they look at a modern day map of Russia, to see where this renowned Stalingrad city actually is.

In the beginning the town was modestly named ‘Tsaritsyn’ [possibly from Turkic sary-sin or yellow island] and this lasted for 3 centuries. In April 1925 the VTsIK (All-Russian Central Executive Committee) of the USSR decreed that it should be renamed. It is said that the idea of ‘Stalingrad’ belonged to the then Premier and Chairman of Sovnarkom (the Council of Peoples’ Commissars), Alexei Rykov. This did nothing to save him from execution in the years of the Great Purges under Stalin.

The sculpture ‘The Motherland Calls’ is visible from all over the city. Lead sculptor Evgeni Vuchetich's symbolic representation of the Soviet victory over the Nazi invaders was inspired by the 'Winged Victory of Samothrace'. From the tip of the sword to the top of the plinth measures 85 metres. Photo: Anton Denisenko

In 1961, when Nikita Khruschev was fighting against the Stalin personality cult, he ordained that the name with its links to Stalin should be wiped off the map. He was not deterred by the fact that in 1942 he himself, as a member of the Supreme High Command General Headquarters, had for six months been at the epicentre of the great battle. Local authorities explained to him that residents didn’t look upon the city’s name as a ‘memorial to Stalin, but saw in it a symbol of victory and a symbol of the state’s power’, but Khrushchev was not be persuaded.

However, it was decided not to return the old name Tsaritsyn to the city because, in the eyes of the Party leadership, it was too reminiscent of the Imperialist past. In November 1961 it was ‘Volgograd’ that appeared on the map of Russia. Only a few buildings have survived from the time of Tsaritsyn, since the city was practically wiped from the face of the earth during the Second World War. It was rebuilt and now the architecture in the central part of Volgograd is Stalinist Empire-style: monumental five-storey buildings with stuccoed facades, and administrative buildings with columns.

General Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus (first on
the right) was captured in the cellars of the Stalingrad
Central Department Store. Following his arrest he
was interrogated by the Soviet Marshal Konstantin
Rokossovski (second on the left)

Volgograd’s history takes hold of its visitors while they are still on the platform at the Central Railway Station. Tourists have hardly left the train when they find themselves in the Square of Fallen Soldiers, with its eternal flame burning, and schoolchildren standing in the centre, paying tribute to the memory of the city’s defenders. There too is the Central Department Store.  On 31 January 1943, two days before the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, the command staff of the southern detachment of Hitler’s troops, headed by General Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, was captured in the cellars of this building.

Also in the central part of the city is the panorama museum ‘The Battle of Stalingrad’. In its grounds stands the legendary ‘Pavlov House’, a simple, unremarkable Stalingrad building, marked on Field Marshal Paulus’ personal map as a fortress. At the time of the battle in Stalingrad, every building was fought over. For almost two months, Pavlov and a handful of soldiers held their line. Because of their courage, the Pavlov House became an impenetrable stronghold.

The main sight of Volgograd, and also the highest point of the city, is the ‘Mamayev Kurgan’ (literally, ‘Mamai’s burial mound’). During the battle, whoever occupied it automatically controlled almost the entire city, the surrounding area, and passage across the river. It was the site of desperate fighting and rivers of blood flowed there. The slopes of the mound were ploughed up again and again by bombs, shells and mines. The idea to construct a grand monument in Stalingrad to commemorate the great battle came about almost as soon as the fighting stopped. The central composition of the Mamayev Kurgan, ‘The Motherland Calls’, stands 52 metres tall and weighs 8 thousand tonnes. Crowning the mound is a figure representing the ‘Motherland’, which is visible from many places in the city.

To this day, it is a tradition that newly-weds visit these historic places after the marriage ceremony to lay flowers at the monuments. In the 50s and 60s, it was probably an expression of gratitude to their ancestors for defending their native land. Now, however, young people are simply honouring the tradition. What’s more, it presents an opportunity to take beautiful wedding photos in the countryside. I, however, am no fan of wedding celebrations for a hundred people, so I didn’t have a white dress or lay flowers at the monuments.

Recently I heard that 1km of road in Russia is more expensive than in any other country in the world. For the alleged cost of laying the road-bed, the same section could be covered with a layer of black caviar...

Twice a year, veteran participants of the battle on the Volga, their children and grandchildren, travel to Volgograd. This is on 2 February, the day the German troops were defeated near Stalingrad, and 9 May, World War II Victory Day. As it says in the song, ‘The Day of Victory is a celebration with tears in our eyes’: for veterans it’s a time for joyful reunions and tragic memories. But with every year the number of participants on the celebratory parade becomes ever smaller. Somewhere I found the latest data that, in Volgograd and its surrounding region, barely more than 1500 participants of the Battle of Stalingrad are still alive.

Sometimes I want to see today’s world through their eyes. Are they proud of their descendants? Do they like the country for whose future they fought? Incidentally, a year ago Russia marked the 65^th anniversary of the end of the war, but to this day there are still veterans who haven’t received the housing they were promised by the government. How do our elders feel as they travel around Volgograd’s shabby streets, given that the authorities have still not managed to accomplish the most banal and necessary task of repairing the city’s transport infrastructure?

In Volgograd only a few buildings have survived from the time of Tsaritsyn and Stalingrad, as the city was practically wiped from the face of the earth during the Second World War.

Historically it came about that the city grew exclusively in length, as more and more factories were built along the bank of the Volga. The residential part of Volgograd also stretched along the river; the city is like a ‘gut’, as the locals say, narrow and long. It’s about 60 km from north to south, which takes one and a half hours in a car, whereas a train from east to west takes about 20-30 minutes.

Traffic and roads

Everything is made even more complicated by the fact that in a city of a million people there is effectively only one road joining the southern and northern districts. That means that if there is an emergency on this main route, an accident, a burst water pipe or simply traffic gridlock, finding a way round the congestion is impossible. So, for example, a year ago, during a period of heavy snowfall, which doesn’t happen very often in Volgograd, the city literally came to a standstill.

The situation was almost laughable: it turned out that the company responsible for clearing the snow didn’t have the right machinery because they had hired it out to someone and ‘forgotten’ to collect it on time. HGVs skidded on the slightest incline, and trucks veered across roads that hadn’t been spread with chemicals, and couldn’t move from where they ended up, blocking the road off to everyone else. All of this led to traffic jams several kilometres long. Yet, at the time the transport debacle was unfolding, the mayor of the city, Roman Grebennikov, was taking a break at a comedy show in the neighbouring region.

The city authorities recently decided to charge lorries to drive through the city. I don’t know how legal this is, but I am 100% sure that it’s not going to solve the problem of our clapped-out roads. One of the reasons for this is that road construction today is one of the most corrupt forms of business in Russia. Recently I heard that 1km of road in Russia is more expensive than in any other country in the world. For the alleged cost of laying the road-bed, the same section could be covered with a layer of black caviar... However, in spite of the massive spending on road construction, it’s not obvious that there are actually any more roads, nor is their quality improving.

The dancing bridge

Perhaps I will finish this theme of roads with a story about the ‘dancing bridge’. The bridge across the Volga stands on reinforced concrete supports. Just after it was opened in 2010, millions of people watched an internet clip of the bridge rocking up and down in the wind, as if it were made of rope. It looked most impressive: the range of swing reached one metre!

Soon after its opening in 2010, millions of people watched a youtube clip of the new bridge over the Volga 'dancing' in the wind, as if it was made of rope.

The bridge took a long time to build - 13 years - and it’s vitally important for the city. Getting to the left bank of the river, where the dachas and holiday sites are and where people live, was previously only possible on a little river tram or on a cargo ferry, which don’t function in winter, or via a diversion across the dam of the Volga Hydroelectric Power Station, but that’s no shortcut! Moreover, the bridge across the Volga in the city is the main road which links the Volga region with Astrakhan, Saratov and the whole of Central Asia. Of course, the bridge’s opening was awaited with trepidation, but the car-owners didn’t have long to enjoy it – after only six months, it began to ‘dance’ in gusts of wind of up to 16 m/s, and was closed. Five days later specialists were satisfied that the bridge was danger-free and it was re-opened, firstly for pedestrians and cars, and then two months later for lorries as well.

The official version put the ‘dances’ down to wind vibration. All in all, the bridge is something of a mystery. No significant technological changes were made in the course of the year, but it no longer danced. Even though winds have since been even stronger than they were on that fateful day.

Often, when watching some foreign film or news items about the USA or Europe, I envy foreigners in an amicable sort of way. Long suspension bridges across rivers, inconceivable viaducts and many-layered roads, highways and high-speed trains. I look at them and I feel almost as a person from a century of steam engines would, looking at the age of computer technology. And it makes me sad.

The mayor

However long I live in Volgograd, I never cease to be amazed by how slowly everything develops in the leisure and the services sectors, and the speed at which new housing is being built is fast approaching zero. I am no longer surprised when I recall the accusations levied by businessmen against the mayor, Roman Grebennikov, who was even expelled from the business organisation, ‘Business Russia’. He was accused of making life a nightmare for local businesses and the accusations were further confirmed by inspectors from the Prosecutor General’s Office. In particular, Volgograd businessmen were saddled with investment conditions that were patently disadvantageous for them, and with charges unrelated to their activities. Land allocations and permission to build and so on depended on the businessmen making so-called ‘charitable’ donations to the city. Not infrequently, while promising parcels of land to entrepreneurs, the mayor’s office actually forced them to carry out expensive works to their design, but then didn’t grant them the land. Who would want to work in those conditions?

I don’t believe in fair elections (and I’m not alone in that), and I’ve had enough of all the pre-election political tactics, the politicians heaping dirt on each other and the revealing articles. It’s sad but true: people enter politics to solve their own personal problems, and not the problems of the people.

I never liked Grebennikov, rather the opposite. In 2001 he became speaker of the regional Duma. He wasn’t yet 30 years old, and he became modern Russia’s youngest leader of a legislative assembly in any of the Federation’s autonomous entities. I remember my colleague, a radio correspondent, returning from a session of the regional Duma, and telling me how Grebennikov swore at deputies who were old enough to be his father. 4 years later, the parliamentarians, unable to put up with him, voted to remove him from the role of speaker.

The ex-mayor is a peculiar and surprising sort of man. Over the three plus years that Roman Grebennikov was mayor of Volgograd, he acquired a not insignificant number of enemies. In the 2007 mayoral election he stood on the Russian Federation Communist Party ticket, and promised not to change his political orientation. But as soon as he won, he joined ‘United Russia’ and later headed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s community liaison office in Volgograd. The leader of the Volgograd Communist Party, Alevtina Aparina, seeing how her former colleague was running the city, publicly repented of promoting Grebennikov’s candidature at the election. The communists even collected signatures calling for his early retirement.

New Volgograd governor Anatoli
Brovko was appointed by President
Medvedev in 2010.

Everyone expected a change for the better when ‘United Russia’ representative Anatoly Brovkowas appointed governor a year ago. It was hoped they would find a common language, but the miracle didn’t happen. Grebennikov continued to accuse the regional authorities of not allocating Volgograd the necessary funding from the regional budget. Brovko in turn repeatedly asserted that the city should be governed by a city manager, who would be the right hand of the governor.

On New Year’s Eve, Grebennikov’s political career cracked. He was first removed from his post as head of Putin’s community liaison office. Then, after a few months, the governor Anatoly Brovko dismissed him from his position as mayor of Volgograd for his failure to implement a range of judicial decisions concerning some of the city’s vital functions. His party colleagues then kicked him out of ‘United Russia’ on the grounds that he had ‘discredited the party’.

During the almost 4 years he was mayor, criminal cases were regularly brought against officials of the city administration. Among Grebennikov’s ‘achievements’ was the abolishment of the traditionally free public transport for schoolchildren. Furthermore, it was revealed that the mayor’s office had purchased flats for the accommodation of orphans at an auction in which only one firm participated. By a strange coincidence, the founder of this single participating firm was Angar Politsimako, a deputy of the regional Duma, which leads one to wonder if the mayor had been receiving a kickback. From everything going on around him, one gets the impression that he is simply an official greedy for money and aware that he is untouchable.

No more than 1500 veterans of the Stalingrad battle are still alive in the Volgograd Oblast. Many of them have not yet received apartments promised them by the Russian government.

Now Grebennikov is trying to re-establish himself in his position through the courts, while an acting mayor has been appointed and deputies will decide in the near future whether to take on a contract manager to run the city.

Elections

This will possibly even be better for Volgograd. After all, mayors elected by the people have not coped well with their duties and Grebennikov’s predecessor ended his career in the dock. What’s more, I don’t believe in fair elections (and I’m not alone in that), and I’ve had enough of all the pre-election political tactics, the politicians heaping dirt on each other and the revealing articles. It’s sad but true: people enter politics to solve their own personal problems, and not the problems of the people. On ballot papers you’ll either see names that no one’s heard of or names no one wants to vote for. So you have to vote for the lesser of the evils, and then you watch how the ‘lesser evil’ you’ve voted for is governing the city you live in.

Most city residents are indifferent as to who will be in the driving seat – Anna Chapman or James Bond, an appointed city manager or an elected mayor. We simply want to live in a well-appointed city in a well-appointed country.

There is no such thing as politics in Russia. Nor are there politicians. Even the elections to the State Duma have been turned into a farce. The absence of any politicians who are really ‘someone’ in our region makes it quite possible that we will be represented at the regular election to the State Duma by Anna Chapman, one of the protagonists of last year’s espionage scandal in the USA. She has already taken her first steps towards a seat as a deputy by joining ‘The Young Guard’, the youth organisation of ‘United Russia’.  She visited her childhood home town, Volgograd, and went to see its local hospital complex, where she paid for the operation of one of its patients, chatted to students from the medical college and gave them money to buy equipment for a disco. She also met young business people from Volgograd. The campaigning has begun.

A Volgograd political scientist predicted Anna’s destiny amazingly accurately. There was a lot of interest in her when she returned to Russia last summer and anyone who could, jumped on the bandwagon. The tabloids published more and more new details from Anna’s life, intimate details included. Volgograd caught this wave and pages of newspapers displayed interviews with Anna’s teachers, school friends and her ‘first love’. One of the publications even announced a competition for the best song about Anna and her spy colleagues. One political scientist said to me in a conversation that he wouldn’t be surprised if Chapman soon appeared among the candidates for a seat in the State Duma. What foresight!

But what do people want?

But this is all a storm in a teacup. Most city residents are indifferent as to who will be in the driving seat – Anna Chapman or James Bond, an appointed city manager or an elected mayor. We simply want to live in a well-appointed city in a well-appointed country. Where cars won’t end up in traffic collisions because of the potholes in the roads. Where there are leafy avenues and parks in which the whole family can relax and not have to walk along uneven paths paved last century to find a rubbish bin or somewhere to sit. We don’t want the hot or cold water turned off regularly in our homes, or rusty sediment and sand to flow periodically out of our taps in place of water because the plumbing system is 70 years old. We want there to be sufficient places for our children at nurseries and for parents not to have to join some fictitious queue to get these precious places. We don’t want to be forced to give up waiting our turn in the queue in despair and to have to offer the manager a bribe to take our toddler anyway. We want housing prices to fall, but if no housing is built, this won’t happen. We want investors to come to our city and build everything: shopping centres, supermarkets, sport complexes, cinemas and clubs, and we don’t want anyone to ‘wreak havoc’ on businesses.

Names again

I almost forgot... Back when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a great deal of support for bringing back the former historical names to Volgograd and to this day our communists are in favour of renaming the city Stalingrad. Nine years ago this matter was even sent up to the State Duma for discussion, but the majority voted against it.

The proposition to return the city its old name Stalingrad has been rejected on a number of occasions, but the memory of the battle lives on.  The Square of Fallen Soldiers with its eternal flame is located in the centre of the city. There is always a guard of honour and never a shortage of flowers.

The writer Vasily Aksyonov proposed a return to the old name of Tsaritsyn. Volgograd seemed to him an impersonal sort of name, devoid of any meaning.

“What does it mean? A city on the Volga? There are so many cities on the biggest river in Europe: Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl, Kazan, Samara, Saratov...” fumed the prominent Russian writer.

Incidentally, as a social survey showed then, around 60% of the population disapproved of the idea of renaming the city. Approximately the same number was suggested by later research. Maybe because many people understand that renaming a city is a rather costly indulgence.

Photos: Volgograd Oblast Administration web site, Wikimedia.

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox: 

Volgograd, official web site

Panorama Museum “The Battle of Stalingrad”

Battle Of The Volga Alive In Russian Memory, by Anne Garrels, NPR, November 4, 2010

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Latest bit of App Store magic gets one up on Google's efforts, but is it still in 'proof of concept' mode?

Going to Spain for Christmas? Think you'll fancy a la cena de pavo? You might want to have a peek first at the latest augmented reality app to hit the stands.

Going by the timeless maxim of futurologist Arthur C. Clarke, Word Lens easily qualifies as a "sufficiently advanced" technology.

Twenty-eight months in the making, Quest Visual's Word Lens app translates the printed word using the iPhone's video camera. Its launch last week sent Twitter and the blogosphere into a frenzy. "This is what the future, literally, looks like," exclaimed TechCrunch.

When pointed at a sentence – strictly English or Spanish for the time being – the app refers to an included dictionary (so no internet connection required) before feeding back the translation in near-real time. Very smart (if you've got an iPhone 3GS or above). Some users have balked at the price – £2.99 for one-way translations – and it's currently got a 3.5/5 star rating from iTunes users.

But how does it fare away from the sleek promo video, out in the real world where shaky hands point phones at paragraphs of text? Er, not all that well actually. The magic fades in and out like a bad radio station signal.

Far from wanting to do the effort down – language is nascent ground for this kind of innovation – these are the points on which this "proof of concept" must build:

• It can really only translate simple, dozen-word-at-most sentences. Brilliant for tourists reading menus or road signs, but perennial problems persist for those wanting more. You have to take small chunks at a time or simply try decode imperfect translations.

• Translations jump about with shaky hands. Not so good if you're freezing.

• No handwriting or stylised fonts - clear printed stuff only. (Perhaps this will help stamp out Comic Sans. Well, we can hope.)

• It needs bright light. May we suggest that from your phone? This is likely because it's performing a machine vision process on the text - basically, a sort of real-time OCR, which then gets bunched into words, and then sentences, and then translated.

• On that basis, lots gets lost in translation. As with Google's efforts in this area, syntax and grammar aren't readily transposed in another language.

Speaking of Google, Reuters wonders what translation would be like if Word Lens put on Google Googles, its Android app which takes a snapshot of text and brings back a translation from the company's servers. "Such an app would deliver on the promise of augmented reality, which has been discussed much but unable to deliver apps that fit into most smartphone owners' daily lives," says Reuters' Kevin Kelleher.

And no, we don't know when Android/RIM/Windows Phone 7/Palm versions will be coming. To quote from the web page: "Our goal was to get a great first release on one platform. Keep in touch!"

Ditto for other languages.

So - have you used Word Lens yet? Is it still in the proof-of-concept phase, or would you readily pay £2.99 for its services?

With almost 50 books to her name, the formidably intelligent Margaret Atwood is a force to be reckoned with. But one year on from the Copenhagen Summit, not even her dark imagination could have predicted the bleak situation the world now faces. Here, she talks about cowardly politicians, her love of birds and why she's joined the Twitterati

It's 25 years since the publication of The Handmaid's Tale, her dystopic masterpiece, but Margaret Atwood firmly resists the suggestion that she might be an icon of Canadian literature. "What does that mean?" she counters in her distinctive prairie monotone, somewhere between a drone and a drawl. "I don't like being an icon." A thin ironic smile. "It invites iconoclasm. Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself."

Now no one has ever dared suggest that Margaret Atwood, a famously scary and prodigiously gifted Canadian intellectual with nearly 50 books to her name – poetry, fiction, critical essays, books for children, radio and film scripts, anthologies and collections of short stories – would ever willingly make an idiot of herself in public. But here's the big surprise: lately she's become game for a laugh. "If you want to see me make an idiot of myself in public," she goes on in that inimitably dry timbre, "you can look it up. Margaret Atwood + goalie + Rick Mercer."

It turns out Mercer is an entertainer who performed this national service when he insisted that the author of The Edible Woman, Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin (which won the Booker Prize in 2000) should get kitted up as an ice-hockey goalie for television in an item entitled "How to Stop a Puck". At first Ms Atwood demurred. No, said Mercer. You've got to be a goalie. Why, she asked. Because it will be funny, he said. Repeating this story against herself, Atwood whispers an aside: "He's from Newfoundland", as if this explains everything.

Mercer was right. It is funny. Not hilarious, but weird. And here's the kicker, which seems to give Atwood a surprising amount of satisfaction. "So I was a goalie," she concludes. "And it went viral on the internet." Cyberspace, it seems, is where she is most at home these days.

A long time ago, in fact less than a year – "but time goes all stretchy in the Twittersphere, just as it does in those folk songs in which the hero spends a night with the queen of the faeries and then returns to find that 100 years have passed and all his friends are dead" – Atwood was advised by the people who were building the website to promote her new novel, The Year of the Flood (2009), that it should include a Twitterfeed. "'A what?' I said, innocent as an egg unboiled. Should I know of Twitter? I thought it was for kiddies."

She can come across as humourless and severe, but I think her deadpan manner is just the shell with which she protects her fierce, inquisitive intelligence. "So I plunged in and set up a Twitter account." Her first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods, one of them with her picture. Eventually these impostors "disappeared". She's the kind of woman who you imagine generally gets her own way like that.

Next she was told she should collect "followers". No problem. There's something contagious about Atwood's imagination: her tweets went viral, too. A few months back she had 33,500 followers. Now she has 97,500, a community of literati, techno geeks, greens, gawkers and thrill seekers, ie pretty much anyone who might pick up an Atwood novel. "There's a whole world out there of which we know nothing," she says. If ever there was an incitement to her imagination, it is the mystery of the world wide web. "You could not make it up," she concludes.

Atwood has just turned 71. After a career that began in a university library and was then spent hunched over a keyboard, she finds the new electronic world "an odd and uncanny place", but plainly relishes it. Just before she met the Observer in central London, she caused a momentary, quasi-literary frisson by contacting two of her followers, a clinical neurologist from Detroit and an Atlanta writer suffering from an autoimmune disease, offering to design "superhero comix costumes" for their avatar alter egos "Kidneyboy" and "Dr Snit".

Characteristically, she was inspired by a mixture of language, science, fantasy and sheer make-believe. "I thought it would be fun," she said. "Their names were so evocative, I asked them what magic powers they would like to have." And then she went one better. Exploiting Twitpic, Atwood posted her designs on the internet, with cartoons of Dr Snit trampling "her arch-enemy", the Paniac, underfoot.

If this also seems weird, in Atwood's mind it connects directly to her childhood. "I grew up in the woods. Don't even think rural. That implies farms. No, we're talking" – a dramatic downshift in tone – "in the woods. A settlement of about six houses [a research station] with no access by car. No electricity. No running water." Young Peggy put this remoteness to good use. "Reading and writing are connected," she explains. "I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw."

Atwood breaks off here with a scholarly aside about Captain Marvel, Superman and the origin of "Shazam!" (formed from the initial letters of classical gods, as Z for Zeus etc). She and her older brother "had a whole galaxy going", she remembers. "Our superheroes were flying rabbits. His came fully equipped with spaceships and weaponry. My rabbits were more frivolous. They were keen on balloons and did a lot of twirling about in the air. The pictures I have of them [which she's kept] show these rather eerie smiles."

At this point, with her own eerie smile, the childhood memories stop and we return abruptly to her work. Fiercely committed to her art, she draws a distinction between science fiction (not for her) and what she calls "speculative fiction" (The Handmaid's Tale and its successors, Oryx and Crake and The Year of The Flood). "I don't do flying rabbits any more. I've never done other planets, except as one thread in The Blind Assassin." Still, the novel won the first Arthur C Clarke award in 1987, though she was promptly disowned by the SF community after she had disparaged "talking squids in outer space".

Atwood's pressing interest, as the daughter of an eminent Canadian entomologist, is our planet and its future. Nothing seems more important to her, and since this concern animates almost everything she does, her conversation segues as easily into global warming as Canadian literature: "The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet – it's a threat to us."

She goes on: "The planet will be OK in its own way. No matter what we do to it, we won't eliminate every last life form from it." As evidence of this, there's the Canadian city of Sudbury, a favourite of Atwood's. When she was growing up in the 1940s, the place was as "barren as the moon" through overlogging, forest fires and relentless mining. "All the rain was acid," she says. It was so bad that "a Sudbury" became a unit of pollution. But then a volunteer programme of regeneration was launched. Earth and seeds were painstakingly stuffed into the cracks between the rocks. Now, "Sudbury has forests again, birds in the trees and fish in the streams." For her, Sudbury, "a symbol of hope", offers a paradigm for the planet.

And so, Atwood continues, with rather bracing realism, "some form of life will remain after us. We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here."

Atwood likes to tell the Amoeba's Tale as an illustration of the "magic moment" at which planet earth now finds itself. There's this test tube, and it's full of amoeba food. You put one amoeba in at 12 noon. The amoeba divides in two every minute. At 12 midnight the test tube is full of amoebas – and there's no food left. Question: at what moment in time is the tube half full? Answer: one minute to midnight. That's where we are apparently. That's when all the amoebas are saying: "We are fine. There's half a tube of food left."

"If you don't believe me," Atwood persists, "look at the proposed heat maps for 20, 30, 50 years from now, and see what's drying up. Quite a lot, actually, especially in the equatorial regions and the Middle East, which will be like a raisin. It's become a race against time and we are not doing well. The trouble with politicians [at events like the Copenhagen summit of 2009] is that no one wants to go first, go skinny dipping and take the plunge. Oh, and then you have people arguing about fatuous things like the environment and human rights. Go three days without water and you don't have any human right. Why? Because you're dead. Physics and chemistry are things you just can't negotiate with. These," she concludes with a kind of grim relish, "these are the laws of the physical world."

Atwood's love for, and understanding of, the world about us comes from her childhood in the woods and her lifelong passion for birdwatching (more tweets). She is the honorary president of the Rare Bird Club and when she took her novel The Year of the Flood on a book tour across the UK and Canada – a trip that was "like setting fire to myself and shooting myself out of a cannon" – it became an all-blogging multimedia green circus that was also fundraising for the RSPB, and rooted in the natural as much as the literary world. "There's nothing," she says, "like squelching through the drizzle after watching the release of the young white-tailed eagles that RSPB Scotland is reintroducing into their once-native territory."

As well as raising awareness of rare-bird vulnerability, she also champions "virtuous coffee consumption". As a result she's had a coffee bean named after her, Balzac's Atwood Blend, which is part of a fundraiser for the Peelee Island Trust (pibo.ca). Spend any time with Atwood and, as well as the flow of compelling, sardonic commentary on the state of the world, and any number of fictional characters from Becky Sharp to Dan Dare, you'll be assaulted by an extraordinary number of Good Causes.

Is she, I wondered, not something of a Victorian in her prodigious output and range of interests? "Oh yes," she replies unfazed. "Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard." Now, finally, we are beginning to approach the origins of her best work.

The Handmaid's Tale is the embodiment of Atwood's aesthetic approach, in which she places "science" as much as "fiction" at the heart of an urgent creative matrix. In the first place, she does not make a fetish of literature. "Human creativity," she instructs, "is not confined to just a few areas of life. The techno-scientific world has some of the most creative people you'll ever meet. When I was growing up, I never saw a division. For instance, my brother [a senior neurophysiologist specialising in the synapse] and I both have the same marks in English and in the sciences."

When Atwood slips unconsciously into the present tense it's as if she is once again an overachieving high-school kid competing for the glittering prizes. "My brother could have gone in the writing direction. And I could have been a scientist." It takes very little effort of the imagination to picture Atwood in a lab coat, supervising a team of cutting-edge researchers.

It's sometimes said that Atwood started out as a poet, and there are plenty of Atwood readers in Canada who prefer her poetry (collections such as The Door and Morning in the Burned House) to her fiction. She insists that this is so only because "I got the poetry published first". She has always been a literary polymath. "I began as all of the things that I currently do: fiction, poetry and non-fiction."

The turning point in her creative fortunes occurred when she took a graduate course in American literature at Harvard. "I'm the only person you've ever met who has read Longfellow." Her interest in the puritan prose of the pre-American revolutionary period comes from her family. Some of her ancestors "were puritan New Englanders", and she puts The Handmaid's Tale firmly in this context: "Nothing comes from nothing." Long before the revolution, she goes on, "the Salem witch trials provide a template that continues to recur in America. That's why I set The Handmaid's Tale in Cambridge, Massachusetts" and borrowed several recognisable features of the university landscape. "Harvard was sniffy about it at first." Another thin smile of caustic satisfaction. "But they've come round."

The Handmaid's Tale is set in the near future, in the Republic of Gilead, a country coterminous with the former USA in which a group of radical chauvinists has seized control. The story of a person named Offred (Of Fred) is the bleak tale of a woman kept as a reproductive concubine of a member of the ruling class. More Huxley than Orwell, Atwood riffs on feminist motifs with a fierce ingenuity that still seems as dateless yet topical as when it first appeared.

One strand in the evolution of her dystopic vision derives from her (unfinished) graduate thesis on the "English Metaphysical Romance", which somehow took in the work of George MacDonald through Rider Haggard, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. "I was always very interested in supernatural female figures," she says. Still, it was a long journey to the speculative vision that characterises Atwood's work today. First of all, there was the small matter of establishing a distinctive Canadian literary voice. The making of a Canadian identity is, she says, part of all Canadians' struggle for survival. The theme of overcoming the odds in a hostile natural world runs through many of her books.

When Atwood started to write there was virtually no Canadian literature, apart from commercial fiction such as LM Montgomery's wildly popular Anne of Green Gables. "When they tried to put together an Oxford Book of Canadian Literary Anecdotes," she reports with a mischievous expression, "they couldn't do it. There were simply not enough dead people." In 1960, for example, there were just five novels by Canadian writers published by Canadian publishers in Canada. "When you talk about my generation," she says, "I am that generation.

"When I started in Canada it was very hard to be a writer. Very few Canadian writers were published, even in Canada. If you wrote a novel you were told that there weren't enough readers in Canada, you must get a publisher in Britain, or the US. Then – Catch 22 – you were told your work was too Canadian."

Perhaps only the Margaret Atwood who sees science and literature as twins, and who began to write far out "in the woods", someone who has forged an identity for herself far from the metropolitan ivory towers of the English literary tradition, could have come up with perhaps her most innovative literary creation, the Long Pen, a remote signature device conceived to enable her to sign copies of her books for the fans without leaving home.

It was launched, disastrously, at the London Book Fair four years ago. "Now it has gone," she says mysteriously, "in other directions, which I will be promoting in March 2011. The original idea six years ago, before the advent of ebooks, was that the publishing industry could not afford to send writers out on tour, but there was an appetite for signed books." She drops into a characteristic moment of pedagogy: "Canada has always been interested in communications networks. Why? Because it's so big. Alexander Graham Bell was no accident. It was not surprising, really, that we were the most wired country in the world first. We addressed the question of how to be in a place you're not.

"So we invented a remote, web-based signature. Handwriting is complex. Now we can go to any country, and so long as they have a reasonable internet connection we can reproduce handwriting by remote signal."

Did she have the vision of the Long Pen on her own? Not exactly. "Well, I was the one who had the initial, idiotic aperçu. Then the people with propellers on their heads developed it. Apparently we have been trying to do this since the 19th century." Atwood's luck was to have the idea "at the same time as the software existed. The g-forces involved in handwriting turn out to be incredibly strong. So the technology has to be durable, flexible and accurate – and now it exists." The passion with which she discusses her invention far outruns her enthusiasm for her own work. In no time she begins to describe the non-literary applications of the Long Pen.

"There are a lot of things that cannot be verified by digital codes. Your will, for instance, has to be signed. It can't be a copy to be legal. The point is," she instructs, "that 'Let's get people to think like machines' has evolved into 'Let's get machines to think like people'." Part of her enthusiasm is commercial. Atwood has a stake in the success of the Long Pen. She will be a formidable advocate for its development, when the commercial launch occurs next year.

"Your writing is you," she says. "Your fingerprints can be detached. I learned that from Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was my hero." Off we go down another path. Conan Doyle turns out to be "a real model of how to kill off your main character and bring him back life". From Conan Doyle the conversation swings through HG Wells to Huxley, to Nineteen Eighty-Four. So I wonder: does she choose Huxley or Orwell?

"We may get both at once. As William Gibson says: 'The future is already here, but it's unevenly distributed.' It's a race against time, because we're already overloaded with nine billion people. At what point do the people with pitchforks and torches come and burn down your lab?"

She drops into a stage whisper. "Physics and chemistry. [The world] can't be sustained. The world is this big, and we can't make it any bigger. You can't put any more unrenewable resources on to it. There's a lot of hi-tech thinking going on. It's that trend versus Famine, Flood, Drought." Listening to Atwood's litany of despair, it's hard not to conclude that the future offers a bleak picture. "Well, it is…" says Atwood. Then suddenly she brightens up, like one of her cartoon characters. "And it isn't. Let's just say it's… a super-challenge."

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is published by Vintage

Robert McCrum is associate editor of the Observer. His latest book is Globish by Viking

A generation of political activists have been transformed by new tools developed on the internet. Here, a leading net commentator profiles seven young radicals from around the world

On Christmas Day, 1990, in a lab at Cern in Geneva, Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee finished building the tools to create the world wide web. This act, 20 years ago, set the agenda for far-reaching transformations in the political sphere, in economies everywhere, in social interaction, even in concepts of our own identity. And Berners-Lee succeeded in doing so for one reason: he released the technology for free.

This simple decision, taken by a computer scientist used to working in environments that promoted openness and transparency, eclipses any hype about subsequent Twitter revolutions, Facebook campaigns or political protests ascribed to the platform since. The invention of the web is comparable to Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1450.

Like the printing press, the web has already been credited with ushering in an age of enlightenment; it is hailed, too, as the most powerful harbinger of social change the world has ever seen. But this isn't the first time such claims have been made. Tom Standage, author of The Victorian Internet, has argued that the telegraph, in the 19th century, inspired rampant technophilia. "The telegraph was the first technology to be seized upon as a panacea," he has written. "It was soon being hailed as a means to solve the world's problems.

"It failed to do so, of course – but we have been pinning the same hope on other new technologies ever since."

So is the web over-hyped? In the 90s, when it still was in its swaddling clothes, revolution meant building a website brandishing the word "REVOLUTION!" in flashing red Comic Sans capital letters on a bright yellow background. Unfortunately, e-radicalism required a degree of technological capability. And political protests online were derivative, often no more effective than a giant billboard that people might drive by on the way to work or the shops. But everything did change in 2003 with the advent of a new crop of publishing platforms, blogs and social networks, that net pundits described as an entirely new phenomenon.

Stripping the hype away, this version of the web gives a new crop of cyber-revolutionaries access to a printing press, a radio station, a cable TV channel and more. Rather than virtual pamphleteering, they are developing technologies that take seed in grassroots communities. The power, as 20-year-old blogger and political activist Jody McIntyre puts it, is with the people.

In particular, there has been an explosion of technologies to circumvent censorship in countries where panic-stricken regimes have tried to stem dissident information. For example, Walid al-Saqaf developed an encryption technology called alkasir when the Yemeni government closed down his news aggregation site, YemenPortal.net. As the son of a campaigning journalist who died in mysterious circumstances, al-Saqaf felt that it was important that he use both his journalism and IT skills to get around the blockade, "because I felt it would have been a betrayal to my own profession to simply manipulate what people see".

"Information freedom is essential if you're really going to live a dignified life," he argues.

The Chinese government is the most infamous of web censors, but there is evidence that even its Great Firewall is collapsing at its foundations. The country's most popular blogger is Han Han, a 28-year-old author (and professional rally car driver) who posts treatises openly critical of the government, but because he speaks in the youth vernacular and enjoys such a tremendous following, his personal politics are generally overlooked by the powers that be.

As Han told me: "Although the internet is controlled, when compared with traditional media, it better reflects reality."

Other political activists I spoke with are using the web's hyper-connectivity and plug-and-play capabilities to crowdsource action. Kenyan-born Ory Okolloh helped create the website Ushahidi in the aftermath of her country's disputed presidential election in 2007; it collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a Google map, and the open-source software has since been released freely and used elsewhere for similar projects. Tom Steinberg is the founder and director of mySociety, a company that builds digital tools to provide a direct pipeline between individuals, local communities and local government.

Despite traditional media's fears that they are fast becoming obsolete, there is great respect among the modern cyber-radicals for the scale of attention that newspapers and TV can bring. "If I was running an election campaign and I had £10,000, I would still spend it all on TV ads, leaflets and posters," Steinberg says. "The internet is good at all sorts of things, but shoving your message down the throats of people who don't care — which is what it takes to win a campaign – it's not particularly great at." But on the web, he says, "you can make things that say, 'Go on, just have a go.'"

In some instances, the political impulse is almost an afterthought. Christopher Poole is the American creator of 4chan, an image-centric bulletin board that he set up to discuss Japanese anime – but now its users, or some of them at least, are making use of the anonymity that the site affords them to campaigning ends.

By contrast, Peter Sunde is the co-founder of the Pirate Bay, a site that allows for the peer-to-peer sharing of computer files of any kind, but one that was set up with an explicitly political purpose. Sunde now has a jail sentence hanging over him.

What today's crop of cyber-radicals demonstrate is that power does reside in the hands of the people, thanks to the foundations laid by Tim Berners-Lee 20 years ago. And a new generation of social activists are exploiting the technological tools available to them for their own agendas.

CHRISTOPHER "MOOT" POOLE – 4CHAN

Created the site 4chan in his New York City bedroom at the age of 15 in 2003, subsequently posting on the site using the pseudonym "moot". He intended the site to be a place to discuss Japanese comics and anime, but it soon morphed into something far bigger. The Wall Street Journal revealed moot's real-world identity in 2008.

What is 4chan?
4chan is an image-centric bulletin board. It's based on a Japanese site called Futaba. Their code was publicly available so I downloaded a copy of their source code and translated the text from Japanese to English from an online resource. It's me, a handful of volunteer moderators and a part-time developer. For a site that has more than 10 million users and 700 million page impressions, most people are shocked to discover that it's not a company, it's not an operation, it's our hobby.

How has it evolved?
All of its growth has been organic. We've never advertised the site; it's been word-of-mouth. Now our traffic is about 12 million unique visitors per month. Part of the way it spread is because the images that are posted lend themselves naturally to be shared via IM [instant messaging], chat or email. People see a funny or provocative image, send it to their friends, and their friends come to 4chan. The community has a very distinct culture and language, and it's responsible for creating and propagating internet memes like lolcats [amusing pictures of cats] and Rickrolling [a prank involving the video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up"]. As that started to trickle out into the mainstream… all of a sudden, it's not just something spread as word-of-mouth by 18- to 25-year-old video game nerds; it's hit mainstream consciousness.

The site is distinctive because users can post material anonymously, and some users have also organised themselves as a collective, using the name "Anonymous". What does that actually mean?
As recently as six years ago, people were used to forums where you could lurk, you could view, but in order to post and participate, you had to register. Because you didn't need to register on 4chan, people started to appreciate it, and realise how radically different it was. We began to see anonymity not just as an aspect or feature, but as a thing, as a principle, as an idea that we are one, we are a collective, we are Anonymous. People then came to the site who not only saw Anonymous as a principle, but started to exploit anonymity as a new platform where they could be rebellious and no one knew who they were.

"Anonymous" started a protest movement against the practices of the Church of Scientology two years ago. Were you complicit in their activities?
I didn't start 4chan as an outlet for dissenting voices and freedom of speech. At first the community was so tame. But as it became less tame, I felt there was something there worth protecting. The rise of social networking is an assault on the free, the open, the anonymous web. I started to appreciate that 4chan is one of the last bastions of freedom online. Anonymity – including anonymous posting – is something to be protected. 4chan is very privileged to be one of the last places for this type of discourse, for this type of interaction. That's important. That's why I've decided to be hands-off and to protect it as a place, and to deliver a platform.

Why?
Anonymity allows you to express and view opinions, images you wouldn't necessarily be comfortable with elsewhere. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to be negative. It's not about, "You can't say fuck on Facebook but you can on 4chan." Services where you have a persistent, registered identity such as Twitter and Facebook – in many cases it's your real identity – limit what users want to say and read. But you can on 4chan. It is an outlet. I was invited to speak at Facebook to provide an alternative and opposite perspective to theirs. Mark Zuckerberg's point of view is that anonymity and monikers and pseudo-identity represents cowardice. He said that if you have nothing to hide, what's the big deal? Why would you be concerned about putting all this stuff on your profile? Well, I'm not a zealot and people like what Facebook is doing. But there is a place for both. They both offer powerful utilities for different needs. The world still needs a Google, and Facebook. But it also needs the anonymous, ephemeral, open 4chan.

Are there any rules?
There is a set of codified rules and we do enforce them: don't break the law or post anything illegal. Past that, the users are left to their own devices.

ORY OKOLLOH - USHAHIDI

Kenyan activist, lawyer and blogger, and co-founder of Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing technology. She is 33 and now lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

What is Ushahidi?
It is a non-profit technology company that specialises in developing free and open-source software for crowdsourcing and interactive mapping. We build tools for democratising information and increasing transparency – we're lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. It started out as an ad hoc group of technologists and bloggers hammering out software in a couple of days, trying to figure out a way to gather more and better information about the post-election violence in Kenya in January 2008. Since then, the platform has gone open-source, and it's free so it's now being used by organisations big and small all over the world.

How did digital technologies best meet your needs, rather than the traditional avenues of publication and dissemination?
Digital technologies offer the ability to get up and running in a low-cost way, and the possibility of reaching a much wider audience.

What is it about the web that makes it such an effective platform?
Its accessibility and the low barriers to publication of information – plus the ability to be who you are.

What can't the web do to change our attitudes and behaviour?
The web can't change our behaviour – it can influence us, but it's individuals who change.

Where will the web have its greatest effect over the next 10 years?
No question: Africa.

JODY McINTYRE – LIFE ON WHEELS

A 20-year old British blogger and author of the site Life on Wheels, Jody was born disabled and campaigns worldwide for justice in Palestine.

Where does Life on Wheels come from?
The site was born out of anger and frustration – as with the birth of every revolutionary movement. Essentially, I was going to college every morning and bus drivers wouldn't let me on the bus because I was in a wheelchair. So in response to these feelings, I began writing the blog, detailing my experiences.

Why use the web?
If you're not given a platform by others, you'll make your own. If your form of resistance is writing, then you will find any means necessary to get that writing out into the public consciousness, even if you have to write it on a piece of paper and pin it up on walls around London – [but] the way I saw it, everyone I knew was going on the internet.

What is it about digital tools that make them effective in galvanising people?
I don't think the internet is some kind of grand solution that will solve all our problems, but it helps because of its capacity to reach people across the world. A lot of revolutionaries talk about the necessity of encouraging revolution and resistance in any context around the world. If we're writing on the internet, the hope that someone in Kashmir or Palestine or Iraq can read what you're writing is a good one. With the web, people in power can't edit or co-opt what we've said. I can publish whatever I want to say. They can't censor our voices any longer. You can say whatever you like about Julian Assange and Wikileaks, but you can't change the video or the images that a million people saw in one day of American soldiers eager to kill Iraqi civilians. People see those images and know the truth is in front of their eyes.

What are its shortcomings?
We need to realise that most people in the world don't have access to the net. The internet is just the first step. The movement we want to build, the revolutionary movement for equality for all people, can only happen through direct action, and direct action on the streets. The internet can play a role in our political education, raising our political consciousness, but as long as people remember that this is a way to plan action, to organise ourselves, to connect people, but not the solution, then we'll be OK.

HAN HAN – BLOGGER

The 28-year-old Chinese professional rally driver, bestselling author, singer, creator of a literary magazine and China's most popular blogger – indeed, possibly the most popular blogger in the world.

What are your greatest criticisms of the Chinese government and the current political climate there?
The Chinese Communist party puts keeping their political position first above everything. Of course, this is the wish of many political parties around the world. For the Chinese government, the reality is that regardless of whether the people are satisfied or unsatisfied, the party's position will always be secure. However, they are sometimes nervous, sometimes arrogant and this attitude has caused many tragedies.

What impact do you hope your web activity will have on the political system?
Although China has many idealistic journalists and media figures, the media are still controlled and censored. Although the internet is controlled, when compared with traditional media it better reflects reality. Rather extreme views or false information may sometimes appear on the internet, but it's only because traditional media fail to take the responsibilities they should take. The government might think the internet is really annoying, but I think it actually helps the government.

How do you think internet-based social change is different in China?
The only difference is English-speaking countries treat the internet as technology, while Chinese-speaking countries treat the internet as medicine.

How did you decide the internet was the best mouthpiece for your views? You already had a profile in traditional media, so why not use them?
It's faster and more direct. It's almost impossible to publish sensitive articles in traditional media. Even though others might delete your writing online, at least you can publish your opinion completely. I don't write articles to oppose a specific party or government; my articles could criticise any party. I'm a writer. How can I call myself an intellectual if I can't write and publish words as I wish?

Why do you feel you can get away with statements against the government that other people wouldn't?
The atmosphere is not as terrifying as people in the west may think. Sometime my articles do get censored, but besides those who advocate policy changes and democratic reform, the government actually doesn't often control or censor writers. The writers here have become smarter: they know what to write and what not to write.

How have you dealt with resistance from your detractors, in particular the Chinese government?
They can only censor my articles, not my thoughts. I can accept this type of censorship. It's a game, and I'm playing by other people's rules. I don't think the government disagrees with the ideas in the articles that were censored; they are afraid of the ideas spreading.

What effect do you feel you are having on the political psyche of China's youth?
I can't really influence them in any way, but I hope that when the country is one day in their hands they will remember the past and take good care of this nation. In that world there is no capitalism, socialism, communism or feudalism; there is also no westernisation or easternisation. There is only right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, good and evil.

Where will the most radical change brought about by the web be felt in 10 years?
I'll answer this question in 2013, when we have confirmation that the world still exists. Otherwise my answer now will be rubbish.

PETER SUNDE – THE PIRATE BAY

The 32-year old Swedish co-founder of the Pirate Bay, the world's leading file-sharing site, allowing users to exchange music, games, videos and more. Found guilty, along with his colleagues, of assisting others in copyright infringement in 2009; lost his appeal last week (after this interview took place) and now faces eight months in jail and a fine shared with his colleagues of £4.1m.

What is the Pirate Bay?
The Pirate Bay was a project developed as part of an "anti-anti-piracy group" started in Sweden called Piratbyrån. Pirate Bay blew up because other file-sharing sites were being shut down because of legal pressure from Hollywood. Most of the other sites were run by 16-year-old guys, and when you're that age and you get a letter from a Hollywood attorney saying they're going to sue you for all the money in the world, you shut down your site. We wanted to make a statement and take on the fight. The internet is based on the idea that everyone can share whatever they want. If you start having gatekeepers you have a consumer-and-producer relationship. We didn't like the idea that corporations would take the internet and turn it into cable TV.

What philosophy lay behind your attitude?
We were influenced by Public Enemy and the KLF. And by traditional French philosophers, rather than by any US west coast libertarians.

What makes you think that the free sharing of files online can be right?
I grew up with computers. I got my first computer when I was nine, and everything I learned about computers was from copies. I wouldn't be able to program if it wasn't for illegally copying my first programming language compiler.

How did your attitude develop?
I started reading academic papers about file sharing that said it is good for the community; it's good for the artist. The only people who lose are the record companies and the studios. Copyright is based on the notion that there are certain companies who should be able to profit from culture. It's not based on the idea any more that people who create things should be able to benefit, or get money for it. Copyright is boring, so no one really wants to get to know it. It's such a big legal field, so the companies who can profit from it have a free arena to dictate terms. But the internet removed the middleman. I don't understand why that's a bad thing. I see the situation in the same way as discovering a car that runs on water and the oil companies forbidding water to be used in cars.

Why is the web important?
It means there are no gatekeepers any more. You have the power to influence people as quickly as you can connect with the internet. With Twitter and Facebook you don't even need to create your own publishing platform. You just have to have an idea. In Sweden, after the recent election, a 17-year-old immigrant girl created a Facebook group calling for a demonstration against the [rightwing, nationalist Sweden Democrats] who were voted into office. Ten hours later, 6,000 people showed up and started demonstrating.

WALID AL-SAQAF – YEMEN PORTAL

The 37-year old Yemeni activist is the creator of Yemen Portal and of software used to circumvent firewalls.

What is Yemen Portal?
YemenPortal.net is a news aggregator. More than 90% of the content is in Arabic. It gathers information or news articles released on official news websites and through dissident and independent sites, and puts them together to present a comprehensive view of what's happening in Yemen. This feature has allowed a lot of people to look into dissident content they didn't know about.

Why was this necessary?
The traditional media in Yemen are very restrictive, and the broadcast media are monopolised by the state: you wake up in the morning in Yemen and turn on the news on TV and you find that all the news is about the president's meetings and the government's meetings.

How did the government respond to the fact that an increasing readership was discovering dissident content through Yemen Portal?
They simply blocked access to it, to the whole site from within Yemen. So I had three choices: give way and let the government control what did and didn't appear on my site; shut it down altogether; or keep the controversial content and find ways to allow people to access the site. I chose the latter, because I felt it would have been a betrayal to my professsion to manipulate what people see. I developed a piece of software called alkasir. If you were browsing the net and wanted to open your Gmail, your Gmail would go through the regular internet service provider. But when you open a blocked website, it activates itself and changes into the encrypted proxy mode. That's better than anonymising everything because if you do that, you give the impression to the monitors at the ISP that there is a fishy connection.

TOM STEINBERG – MYSOCIETY

The 33-year old founder of mySociety, which has developed websites in the UK including TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem, aiming to bring greater transparency to government.

What is mySociety?
MySociety builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and democratic parts of their lives. We run various democracy and transparency sites in the UK that do things like make it really easy to find out how your politicians voted or, on a more local level, help you report problems to the council, such as potholes and broken streetlights, or get information out of government that you might want via the Freedom of Information Act.

How can the web be used as a tool to influence people?
The internet enables you to help people to achieve things they might want to get done in their lives and in their communities on a scale that is not possible unless you are using such a cheaply scalable digital technology.

How has it transformed the political process?
There is no one thing that is "internet politics". There really are two worlds: partisan campaigning to exert power and to beat your opponents into a pulp; and the creation of what you might call empowering platforms using general-purpose tools that let people communicate, act, exert power or achieve goals like requesting information out of the government. These two really different things often get bundled together. There's actually quite a big difference between the way that Barack Obama used what was essentially an extremely good credit card form to raise $500m through his website, taking that money and using it to buy TV adverts and posters to beat the Republicans, versus services like those that we run. We build platforms so that people can achieve potentially smaller things that are not so single-minded in purpose.

What it is that you want to change by building these platforms?
We get people who've never tried to campaign on anything, they've never written to a politician, but if you make the barrier low enough and give them a reason, you'll push them over the edge.

Is the best way to influence the public to give them the tools or the messages?
If I was running an election campaign and I had £10,000, I would still spend it all on TV adverts, leaflets and posters. The internet isn't massively good at making people think things they don't currently think. It's very good at helping people to do things when they decide that they want to. I think that TV and adverts on the side of buses will be playing a dominant role in politics for a long time to come. But I'm a great believer that the internet will strengthen the community on your street because it can bring together people who care about an issue who didn't previously have a voice, so that they can then shout loudly enough to make political bodies and organisations pay attention.

Are you trying to transform local politics?
It would be lovely if measurably more people in the future felt they could realistically be part of the solution if there was some problem in their community, that it's not just something unimaginably over their heads that's dealt with by another class of people that they never meet. I am out to give as many people as I can a better experience of dealing with the democracy they live in and the government that rules over them.

The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net.

The last few months have been a bumpy stretch for public media. Due to controversial editorial decisions at both NPR and PBS, these organizations have gone from just covering the news to being the focus of it as well.

NPR has faced withering criticism from the right for its seemingly abrupt firing of news analyst Juan Williams. The local Mississippi Public Broadcasting received similar criticism from the left after it dropped the popular national show Fresh Air from its line-up due to what it viewed as inappropriate sexually explicit conversation. And PBS came under fire for cutting controversial comments Tina Fey made about Tea Party-favorite Sarah Palin from its broadcast of the Mark Twain Prize ceremony, supposedly due to time constraints.

While each of these firestorms was put out by the institution that created the controversy, the second annual National Public Media Camp, which wrapped up last night at American University (AU) in Washington, D.C., provided an opportunity for representatives from all three organizations to share their experiences and -- more importantly -- the lessons learned. Not surprisingly, the session entitled "How to handle an online revolt" was one of the many highlights of a packed weekend of diverse discussions.

How it Worked

"The goal of PubCamp," said NPR social media strategist Andy Carvin, "is to create an informal but high energy environment where members of the public with certain skills to bear can come and work with public media staff to find ways to collaborate with each other."

PubCamp organizers Carvin, PBS product manager Jonathan Coffman, iStrategyLabs founder Peter Corbett, and MediaShift corespondent Jessica Clark employed a freewheeling, unconference format to facilitate this interaction. Each morning, all of the station managers, fundraisers, and web developers -- as well as the larger group of public media enthusiasts in attendance from non-profits, the press, and tech community -- gathered in the large conference room provided by AU and shared ideas for sessions and discussions over coffee and bagels.

"The entire success or failure of the event is based on what attendees are willing to propose in that first hour," Carvin explained. "That puts enough pressure on the people who come to put some thought into it and to do something constructive and interesting."

The 160 or so participants, some of whom came from as far away as Brazil and Japan, were not lacking for ideas. Out of this participatory process came informational sessions like "Metadata best practices," big idea talks like "How does public media respond to the culture wars?" as well as technical discussions about the Android mobile platform in "Collaborating with Google."

While nominally led by the person or team who proposed the topic, sessions were similarly reliant on the input of the attendees. For example, Jon Gordon of Minnesota Public Radio guided a talk about effective use of social media on Saturday afternoon.

"I proposed that session not because I really had the answer but because I have questions to ask of the community here," said Gordon, who took over as the social media and mobile news editor at MPR earlier this year. There was enough interest that a second social media discussion was staged on Sunday morning.

Gordon attended his first public media unconference in St. Paul in 2008. This community engagement and brainstorming event, as well as another staged by Santa Cruz public radio station KUSP, helped inspire the first National PubCamp and a dozen other local PubCamps last year.

How it Succeeded

Many first-time attendees found the unconference process somewhat bewildering, but everyone I spoke with seemed happy with the discussion it produced.

E-Democracy.org executive director Steven Clift, another Minnesotan who was among the third of conference-goers who were not public media employees, made the trip primarily "to meet the people in the online side of public media," he said.

Clift also used his first PubCamp experience to discuss a pet issue he's passionate about: improving the quality of online news commenting by reducing user anonymity. "Local newspapers are fundamentally undermining their democratic mission -- and their brands -- by hosting poor quality commenting," he said.

NPR mobile operations manager Jeremy Pennycook was excited to meet Michael Frederick, a software engineer at Google who NPR CEO Vivian Schiller described as "a celebrity" in her welcome speech at the opening plenary.

"It's always great to develop relationships with people who are in your field but aren't doing what you're doing," Pennycook said. "It's my job to go between people like Michael Frederick who are knee deep in code and people who are content producers or making decisions about media at the executive level."

Although Frederick's primary job is programming Google Docs, he used the 20 percent of time his company sets aside for creative ventures to work with Pennycook and build the much beloved NPR Android mobile app.

How it Aims to Change Public Media

Carvin hopes future PubCamps will lay the groundwork for more open source collaborations like the one between Pennycook and Frederick. Carvin said he hopes PubCamp becomes a "movement," and noted that his primary complaint about the first full year of the organization was that it had not produced more technical advances.

"One thing that I wanted to see happen at more of at the PubCamps we did this summer was more people writing code," he said.

To foster innovation at the national PubCamp, the organizers set up a separate room stocked with food and plenty of coffee for developers. The "Dev Lounge" produced one tangible result: A WordPress plug-in that will allow users to edit, excerpt, or fully republish NPR stories. Two other projects -- an SMS polling platform and a trackback system for quotes -- were also in the works.

But the most lasting result may be the connections formed in the Dev Lounge -- and indeed within the PubCamp as a whole. At the closing plenary, the coders announced they were forming a Google Group to float new ideas and keep in touch. As Amy Wielunski, a membership manager working on fundraising for dual licensed PBS/NPR station WSKG in Binghamton, N.Y., pointed out, "just the fact that we're having these conversations is a huge step forward."

"Why would I have ever had a reason to interact with Andy Carvin before?" asked Wielunski, who spoke up at the online revolt session about how the Juan Williams incident had affected membership contributions at her station.

"I wouldn't," she said.

*****

What did you think of the National PubCamp? If you weren't able to attend, what did you think of the event coverage on Twitter and NPR? Would you attend a future PubCamp? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Photo of Jay Rosen by Julia Schrenkler via Flickr

Corbin Hiar is the DC-based associate editor at MediaShift and climate blogger for UN Dispatch and the Huffington Post. He is a regular contributor to More Intelligent Life, an online arts and culture publication of the Economist Group, and has also written about environmental issues on Economist.com and the website of the New Republic. Before Corbin moved to the Capital to join the Ben Bagdikian Fellowship Program at Mother Jones, he worked a web internship at the Nation in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @CorbinHiar

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The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net.

Public media is facing the same pressures as commercial media when it comes to digital: How can they transition to a new age of social media, collaboration and audience interaction? From today until Thanksgiving, MediaShift will have a special in-depth report on Public Media 2.0, with analysis, case studies, a 5Across video roundtable and coverage of this weekend's national PubCamp in Washington, DC.

Public broadcasters have been facing intense heat this fall, from dodging flak after the Juan Williams firing to rebutting calls to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to defending the diversity of their news programming. But the negative coverage often misses a deeper story -- of the transition of this sector to a more innovative and varied set of Public Media 2.0 organizations that are finding fresh ways to network with users, partners and one another.

Over the past year here in the Public MediaShift section, Center for Social Media researchers and practitioners from the field have been covering varied public media experiments -- including youth media, government transparency tools, community-level collaboration and a converged national newsroom. These explorations reveal five emerging trends that are helping to reshape and broaden the public media sector so that it can better inform and engage users.

1) Learning to COPE

Adopting a COPE strategy -- "create once, publish everywhere" -- is making public media more modular and flexible.

"I don't know about you," CPB's vice president of digital strategy Rob Bole told the audience at a FedTalks event in mid-October, "but my life is split between my home, the train, work, meetings, going back on the train, playing with my kids, paying bills, and actually trying to spend some time and converse with my wife. So, I need a public media that is built for me -- that continues to be essential, to help me navigate through troubled times, to be interesting and surprising, but built for my somewhat crazy life."

Here's a video of Bole's talk:

Bole went on to explain how public broadcasting organizations are repurposing content for distribution across multiple mobile and digital platforms to reach people where they are.

Breaking content into portable digital pieces is in turn powering other capabilities. For example, the newly redesigned PBS site offers greater visibility for local content by providing a shared platform for video exchange between stations and national producers.

In the long run, aggregating locally produced content online will increase users' access to a rich supply of diverse stories and perspectives, along with cultural and historical gems that rarely appear on commercial broadcast outlets. "There's something there for everyone," Bole said.

Similarly, public access TV centers are developing the Community Media Distribution Network, which allows for content sharing and archiving of citizen and independent productions -- an often-overlooked source of grassroots public media. If all goes as planned, both independent media and public broadcasting from previous decades will also be made available to both users and outlets through the American Archive project -- a sort of COPE-retrieval mission.

This is a complex and daunting multi-year undertaking that will involve hundreds of stations and digitization of materials across both analog and digital platforms. An analysis of the scope for the project, released in June, laid out the steps and related challenges.

2) Sharing Knowledge with Peers

Registration now is maxed out for this weekend's second annual Public Media Camp, which the Center for Social Media is organizing with NPR, PBS and iStrategy Labs. Organized by their attendees, PubCamps are designed to help public broadcasters, tech developers and public media users share best practices and work together on community engagement projects.

Several local PubCamps have taken place at stations around the country since last October. The gatherings are proving to be valuable opportunities for trend-spotting within the field, and venues for introducing stations to national platforms, tools, and funding sources. Proposed sessions so far address tips for sustainable collaboration, previews of coming apps, such as the one from PBS' "Antiques Road Show," and suggestions for what public media makers can learn from anime fandom.

NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin, who has been central to organizing the events, said more than 300 people have registered for this weekend, representing 40 different public media organizations.

"Public media has a long tradition of public support, especially in terms of people making donations to their local station," Carvin told me. "With PubCamp, we're working with stations to develop new ways for them to engage people who want to become even more involved, donating their expertise to help strengthen the station's role in the community. I'm most excited about the fact that the majority of attendees won't be staff -- they'll be people around the country who simply care a lot about public media, and are willing to donate their time to help us in one way or another."

The PubCamps reflect a broader surge in journalism-related unconferences, such as the Media Consortium's Independent Media Mobile Hackathon, or the numerous participatory meetings hosted by Journalism That Matters. These events incubate new projects by connecting attendees first face-to-face and then through an array of social networking tools. The flow of participants across the various gatherings and platforms is bringing fresh approaches and constructive critique to a previously cloistered sector.

3) Boosting Community Engagement

Peer learning has proven to be particularly popular in the area of engagement -- a fast-growing but controversial priority for public media makers still adjusting to expectations for greater participation and interaction set by social media. Public engagement has been built into the DNA of community access centers for decades, through production training and ascertainment processes designed to figure out communities' information needs. But public broadcasting stations often feel trapped in a double bind: They are simultaneously expected to provide "balanced" news and analysis, and to actively involve users in civic issues.

To the rescue comes the CPB-funded National Center for Media Engagement (NCME), which has been hosting a series of webinars that bring producers, station staff and online innovators together to discuss engagement experiments and opportunities. Accompanied by lively sidebar chats among attendees, the webinars offer real-time snapshots of effective projects in process.

For example, one featured the Wisconsin Public Television's Vietnam veterans "welcome home" event, a multi-platform model for engaging tens of thousands of local veterans who felt alienated by their stateside reception. The project grew from veterans' strong responses to a documentary, War Stories, and now several other stations have hosted or plan to host related events. Portraits and oral histories from the veterans are available here along with transcripts, related maps, educational resources, the full documentary, excerpts from the companion book, and a digital honor roll of Wisconsin vets who died in Vietnam.

By capturing and analyzing the stories of such successful engagement projects, the NCME hopes to provide both inspiration and concrete prototypes. They offer a related guide, along with training and fundraising resources, to support public media outlets in such efforts. Staffers are actively reaching out to producers from other sectors for lessons and models; they recently announced that they'd partner with the Integrated Media Association, which is hosting a track at the next South by Southwest Interactive Festival for public media makers.

4) Building Strategic Partnerships

"Collaboration" is a rising buzzword in public media circles, but finding successful ways to match projects, capacity and strategies is not always easy. In a December MediaShift piece, Amanda Hirsch laid out some of the complexities, including getting buy-in from top managers at each partner organization, assigning staff to the collaboration project itself, and establishing formal communication channels.

"Don't assume that working together means saving time -- that's not the value proposition of collaboration," she wrote. "The value proposition is about quality."

For these reasons, it's often easier to start with time-limited collaborations with clearly defined outcomes. In Philadelphia, such an approach will be tested via the Philadelphia Enterprise Reporting Awards. Announced in late October, the awards are supported by the William Penn Foundation and administered by J-Lab. Fourteen projects received grants of $5,000 each, designed to both support in-depth reporting projects and to explore whether it's possible to connect the "silos of journalism throughout the city." The idea is to provide more entry points to expose news consumers to public affairs content and "create a 'knowledge network' among the region's news initiatives, so they can add to, amplify, link to or broadcast news that is being created but that their niche audiences might not otherwise come across," according to the Awards site.

Public broadcasting station WHYY is involved in three of these projects -- Anatomy of a School Turnaround, in conjunction with the Philadelphia Public School Notebook; the Power Map of Philadelphia, in conjunction with the Philadelphia Daily News, Philly.com and an institute at the University of Pennsylvania; and ArtBlog Radio, in conjunction with theartblog.org. Two of the collaborations intersect with WHYY's newly launched NewsWorks project (more on that in tomorrow's piece on public broadcasting news experiments). Community media producers, including cable access station PhillyCam and media training center Scribe Video are also grantees, as well as digital citizen news projects such as Phawker.com and Metropolis.

Besides being interesting in their own right, this array of projects highlights the strengths and goals of various nodes in Philadelphia's news ecosystem, suggesting how non-commercial public media might help to fill key gaps.

5) Paying Attention to Policy

Historically, public broadcasters have lacked the resources, expertise or coordination to regularly track and intervene in the policy-making that supports them.

"The system has no long-term policy planning capacity, and therefore it always has had great difficulty dealing with the periodic efforts by outsiders to critique and 'reform' it," wrote Wick Rowland, the president of Colorado Public Television in the October 22 issue of Current. He continued:

Public broadcasting ignores most media policy research, whether it originates in academia, think tanks or federal agencies, and it often seems out of touch with major national policy deliberations until too late. That disengagement is highly dangerous because it allows others to set the national legal and regulatory agenda for communications without assuring adequate policy attention to public-service, non-commercial and educational goals. Such policy initiatives also can negatively affect the funding and operating conditions of every public licensee.

However, two countervailing trends are now capturing the attention of both public broadcasters and the broader public media sector. On the one hand, a series of high-profile reports and agency hearings have proposed reforming public media and expanding funding as a corrective to the loss of reporting capacity across the country.

On the other hand, calls to cut or abolish public broadcasting are on the rise, both from members of the soon-to-be-Republican House and from President Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (the commission on reducing the deficit).

Productive reform will be complex and contentious, but not impossible. As Steve Coll, the president of the New America Foundation, observed in the cover story of the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review:

The problem is that the media policies that govern us in 2010 -- a patchwork stitched from the ideas of Calvin Coolidge's Republican Party, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and Ronald Reagan's deregulatory wave -- have been overtaken by technological change.

From the country's founding, American media and journalism have been continually remade by technological innovation. Political pamphlets made room for industrially printed newspapers, which made room for the telegraph, which made room for radio, which made room for broadcast television, which made room for cable and satellite services, which made room for the World Wide Web, which is making room even as we read this for the Kindle, iPad, and mobile phone applications.

When such technological, industrial, and economic changes dislodge the assumptions underlying public policy, the smart response is to update and adjust policy in order to protect the public interest. And politically plausible reforms that would clearly serve the public are within reach. It is time to reboot the system.

These myriad political pressures are driving public media to a tipping point, in which the case for a new social contract with the public will either be made or will fail to convince. While the non-commercial and digital public media sector is larger than the public broadcasters, the broadcasters are the most well-funded and visible players. As Rowland suggests, it is time for them to step up, demonstrate vision, and tell their own story of the shift to Public Media 2.0.

Jessica Clark directs the Future of Public Media Project at American University's Center for Social Media, and is a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation.

The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net.

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Please Donate To The Kenny McKinley Trust Fund to help with the future needs of his 1-year old son Keon.

NFL Game Center: Indianapolis Colts at Denver Broncos - 2010 Week 3
Broncos QB Kyle Orton is quietly having a great start to the season, but Peyton Manning could be primed to shred Denver's secondary.

Orton can see he's in fans' favor - The Denver Post
In the south end zone at Invesco Field at Mile High, a sign read: "#8 is Great!"

Paige: We must learn from McKinley's death - The Denver Post
Colorado, which typically has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation, had a record 940 deaths by suicide last year. — The Denver Post, Sept. 12, 2010

Colts are coming, so the attention shifts to football - The Denver Post
With Kenny McKinley's locker still as it was when he died Monday, the Broncos went about the business of football Wednesday.

Woody's Mailbag: Broncos have fallen off national radar - The Denver Post
I am a Broncos fan who lives near Boston. I listen to a lot of sports radio on my commute to work. This morning there was talk about the Laurence Maroney trade. The morning crew referred to the Broncos organization as a joke. They claim that Josh McDaniels likes anything that Bill Belichick ever got his hands on. They picked on Josh for wearing the hoodie, for signing Jarvis Green to guaranteed money and then cutting him, for moving up and drafting Tim Tebow and for (the Maroney) trade. They even went so far as to blast the organization for picking up Chad Jackson in 2008 at one point (although I don't believe that McDaniels was there yet). It made me sick to my stomach to listen to, as does most Patriots talk. But it got me thinking. Is this the perception of the Broncos organization across the country, and are those thoughts starting to creep into Denver? I like the direction that Josh is taking the team, but I think he just needs some time, which is often a luxury teams can't afford in the win-now NFL. What are your thoughts?

Players can get plenty of help - The Denver Post
They may be bigger, stronger and faster than most, may perform their jobs in front of thousands of people, but in the wake of wide receiver Kenny McKinley's suicide Monday, the Broncos say they often find themselves facing the same emotional and personal issues as do the fans watching them.

Analysis: Colts' Manning is too cool to fool - The Denver Post
Besides the coaches in the AFC South, who find themselves smashing their heads on a desk twice a season, Broncos coach Josh McDaniels has faced the Colts' Peyton Manning more than most.

Q&A;: NFL debut for Broncos rookie Demaryius Thomas was dandy - The Denver Post
Q: In this young season, who is the Broncos' No. 1 receiver from a fantasy football perspective, Eddie Royal or rookie Demaryius Thomas? I have picked up Royal after a solid two weeks, but I also noticed that Thomas had a big game in Week 2.

Rehashing the Broncos decision: Kyle Orton or Jason Campbell? | All Things Broncos
Remember when Jay Cutler left the Broncos no choice but to trade him in April, 2009? The options came down to two: The Washington Redskins, who were offering two, first-round draft picks and their starting quarterback Jason Campbell; and the Chicago Bears, who offered two first-round draft picks and starting quarterback Kyle Orton.

Harris, Kuper return, but Bailey and Goodman out | All Things Broncos
Three previously injured players returned Wednesday for the first day of practice in preparation for the game Sunday against the Indianapolis Colts _ starting right tackle Ryan Harris (ankle), starting right guard Chris Kuper (knee) and backup safety Darcel McBath (forearm).

San Diego Chargers reject several offers for Vincent Jackson, sources say - ESPN
The San Diego Chargers have rejected several trade offers for wide receiver Vincent Jackson, letting the Wednesday deadline to trade him pass without making a deal.

Rex Ryan rules out injured New York Jets CB Darrelle Revis vs. Miami Dolphins - ESPN New York
Darrelle Revis will miss Sunday's game at Miami after aggravating an injured left hamstring last week in a win over the Patriots.

Braylon Edwards returns to New York Jets practice - ESPN New York
Sensitive to the perception that Braylon Edwards is getting away with a light punishment for his drunken-driving arrest, the New York Jets shifted into damage control Wednesday, suggesting they're handcuffed by the collective bargaining agreement with the players' union.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers safety Tanard Jackson suspended indefinitely for violating drug policy - ESPN
Tampa Bay Buccaneers safety Tanard Jackson has been suspended indefinitely for violating the NFL's substance abuse policy, the team announced Wednesday afternoon.

Philadelphia Eagles hear from several teams about Kevin Kolb, source says - ESPN
The Philadelphia Eagles have received numerous calls about the availability of quarterback Kevin Kolb from several teams, according to a senior team official.

Charlie Batch to start for Pittsburgh Steelers against Tampa Bay Buccaneers - ESPN
The forgotten quarterback is now the Pittsburgh Steelers' starter.

Sources: Dennis Dixon of Pittsburgh Steelers out up to 6 weeks after surgery - ESPN
Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Dennis Dixon underwent arthroscopic surgery on the lateral meniscus of his left knee Wednesday, and his recovery time is expected to be close to six weeks, sources told ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter.

New York Jets coach Rex Ryan tells his players to stop embarrassing the franchise - ESPN New York
Humiliated by the recent conduct of his team, New York Jets coach Rex Ryan scolded his players in a Wednesday morning meeting, telling them it's time to end the frat-house behavior.

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San Diego Chargers rookie running back Ryan Mathews has a high right ankle sprain and didn't practice today.

QB carousel in full swing around the NFL | National Football Post
Even before Eagles’ head coach Andy Reid announced that Michael Vick would start at QB over Kevin Kolb on Sunday, we have seen plenty of quick moves at the quarterback position around the league. Let’s take some time today to break down the QB situations in Carolina, Buffalo and Oakland—where three new starters step under center this Sunday.

Derrick Mason says media silence isn't permanent | National Football Post
Hours after saying that he won't conduct interviews for the remainder of the season, veteran wide receiver Derrick Mason said his media silence isn't permanent.

James Harrison fined $5,000 for hit on Vince Young | National Football Post
The NFL has reviewed hard-hitting Pittsburgh Steelers outside linebacker Jerome Harrison's body slam of Tennessee Titans quarterback Vince Young, and the verdict is in.

Keith Bulluck says Titans never made an offer | National Football Post
New York Giants linebacker Keith Bulluck made it abundantly clear that he felt unwanted by the Tennessee Titans as a free agent this offseason.

Cowboys licking their wounds following loss to Bears | National Football Post
The Chicago Bears would have you believe they knocked some intimidation into the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday.

Bills vote in favor of decertification, bracing for lockout | National Football Post
The Buffalo Bills' players have become the seventh team to vote in favor of decertification if a collective bargaining agreement can't be brokered between the NFL Players Association and NFL owners.

Addai, Brackett sidelined for Colts | National Football Post
Indianapolis Colts running back Joseph Addai and middle linebacker Gary Brackett didn't practice today due to knee and back injuries, respectively.

No more Mike Singletary interviews for Dennis O'Donnell | National Football Post
The station pulled an interview O’Donnell did with the 49ers coach from its Web site last week after the coach grew heated at different points. O’Donnell will be replaced by Kim Coyle, according to Daniel Brown of the San Jose Mercury News.

NFL.com news: Holdout Jackson: Chargers' failure to trade me 'feels unethical'
Neil Schwartz, the agent for Vincent Jackson, said he had a contract with a new team essentially written up, but the San Diego Chargers' insistence on heavy trade compensation for the Pro Bowl wide receiver nixed the deal before Wednesday's deadline.

NFL.com news: Gradkowski wrests Raiders' starting QB job from Campbell
Five months after acquiring Jason Campbell to be their starting quarterback, the Oakland Raiders benched him in favor of Bruce Gradkowski, beginning with this week's game at Arizona.

NFL.com news: Veteran WR Evans backs Bills' decision to start QB Fitzpatrick
No fan of in-season quarterback shuffles, Buffalo Bills wide receiver Lee Evans wasn't in a position to dispute the team's latest decision to go with Ryan Fitzpatrick as the starter.

NFL.com Blogs " Blog Archive Saints not as feared without Bush "
The loss of Reggie Bush is a big deal for the Saints. The multi-dimensional Bush represents coach Sean Payton’s biggest chess piece on offense.

NFL.com news: Newman-Johnson one of Week 3's key matchups
This is a battle for turf in Texas and is important for marketing. These two teams split their first two meetings. A loss here would inflict serious damage on a Cowboys team that has Super Bowl expectations. As for the Texans, they need to win to show their fans this team is for real, and it helps their credibility within the state.

NFL.com news: Icing kickers with timeouts a cold reality likely here to stay
When Gary Kubiak called a timeout a split-second before Redskins kicker Graham Gano booted what would have been a winning field goal, the Texans coach ignited one of the most passionate issues in the league -- icing the kicker. It worked because when Gano went back for a second try, his kick sailed wide right.

NFL.com news: QB controversies aside, goal is to put team in best spot to win
It's Week 3, so naturally quarterback controversies are front and center. Four coaches in particular are dealing with the fallout from such controversies.

NFL.com news: When it comes to defensive success, big plays tell the tale
On Sunday night, Mario Manningham caught a beautifully arced pass at the 22-yard line, spun out of a desperate tackle attempt and put the Giants on the board with their first touchdown. It was Colts 24, Giants 7. Yippee for the G-Men.

Ryan scrambling to bring order in Jets carnival - NFL - Yahoo! Sports
Rex Ryan was furious. For all the foolishness, the vows of winning the Super Bowl and the urge to forever snack, the New York Jets coach can bring the fury. And on Wednesday morning as he stood before his team, two of the players would later say he was as angry as they had ever seen.

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"Archie Manning had it right about this organization," Schwartz said."Multiple teams have told me that they can’t get a deal done with A.J. and some of the teams have referred to A.J. as ‘The Lord of No Rings,’ " Schwartz said. "That’s how they characterized him."

Recently, a few of us had the chance to spend some time with Windows DJ Darek Mazzone during his weekly modern global music show “Wo’ Pop” on KEXP, a radio station broadcasting in Seattle, New York and worldwide on the Web.

We crammed into the small DJ booth to watch Mazzone and his crew work. While Mazzone queued up his song selections, show assistants Brenda Tausch, Liza Zinina and Rebecca Campeau scoured the Web for information on each group or artist to feed into KEXP’s real-time online playlist. “Wo’ Pop” features music from what Mazzone calls the “six corners of the world” – from Cambodian rock to Cuban hip hop and everything in between.

Between sets, Mazzone talked about how the Windows PC has helped spur a creative revolution by putting the tools to record, produce and share music in the hands of anyone who has access to a Windows-based computer, some microphones and a quiet place to record.

“The PC running Windows is at the center of this... with Windows, you don’t really need to spend a whole bunch of money to get started making stuff and creating. It’s about choice, performance and simplicity.”

<div><img alt="DCSIMG" id="DCSIMG" width="1" height="1" src="http://m.webtrends.com/dcsygm2gb10000kf9xm7kfvub_9p1t/njs.gif?dcsuri=/nojavascript&WT.js=No" mce_src="http://m.webtrends.com/dcsygm2gb10000kf9xm7kfvub_9p1t/njs.gif?dcsuri=/nojavascript&WT.js=No"/></div>

Mazzone and fellow Windows DJ Dave Pezzner will be sharing their knowledge and talent this week at the 7^th annual Decibel International Festival of Electronic Music, Visual Art, and New Media. Windows 7 is the presenting partner of Decibel (dB) Conference, which features free educational panels, workshops and screenings. Twenty thousand people from around the world are expected to attend Decibel, which runs Sept. 22-26 at various venues in Seattle.

And we’ll be sharing, too. We’ll be posting pictures, videos and stories from Decibel this week on the Windows Experience Blog, Microsoft News Center and Twitter.

As an amateur musician (keyboard, vocals) and a fledgling producer, I’m excited to learn more about how Windows 7 can help me create, collaborate and share. I’ll share my (mis)adventures in future posts and stories, with how-to tips from the Windows DJs, videos and more. Stay tuned – you can follow me on Twitter at @sandraleduc or @microsoft and my Windows cohort Ashley Brown to get the latest updates.

*Note: The intro music is on the video is “Los Revueltos” by Roberto Bonaccorso of MangoSon. Used with permission. 

Related Links & Information:

Windows 7 to Turn Up Decibel(s) at Music Festival

Windows DJs – Windows Experience Blog

Decibel Festival

Decibel Conference

“Wo’ Pop” on KEXP

Posted by Sandra LeDuc, Senior Managing Editor, Microsoft News Center

Dan Rather came to The Poynter Institute this week to speak to members of the public about his years as a broadcast journalist. Before Rather's talk, I interviewed him about the state of today's news industry and what can be done to improve it. You can read a full transcript of the interview below.

		RELATED
		"Rather: 'The Public is Not Well-Served by Political Coverage as it is Today' " by Mallary Jean Tenore

Mallary Tenore: In a Washington Post column last year, you wrote that newspapers are the foundation on which hard news rests. More specifically, you said: "The old news model is crumbling, while the Internet, for all its immense promise, is not yet ready to rise in its place and won't be until it can provide the nuts and bolts reporting that most people so take for granted that it escapes their notice." I'm going to violate journalism rules and ask you a three-pronged question: Can you say more about why you think the Internet isn't ready to rise up to the old news model? What will it take for it to rise up, and do you think it ever will?

Dan Rather: Well I did write the story in The Washington Post and I believe it to be true that with journalism, the old order is gone and the new order is not yet in place. ... We have to deal with the here and now. It's all good to talk about the future of journalism and the Internet, which I'm optimistic about and I think there's a great future for journalism and a lot of added value to be had on the Internet, but we're still in the first, early stages of the Internet's potential. ... I think American journalism is in crisis. The crisis has to do with part of the old model falling. The old business model is gone and no viable business model has yet emerged.

There are very few journalism enterprises on the Internet, keeping in mind that the Internet does a lot more than journalism. (It does information, education, marketing and a lot of other things.) But on the journalism side of the Internet, most of what's on the Internet is gathered from other original sources.

In other words, there are not enough boots on the ground, there are not enough working reporters making calls, wearing that shoe leather, doing original reporting. There's a word for it that escapes me at the moment. What is it when they gather information from other places and they sort of accumulate stuff from newspapers, magazines, radio, television and other places on the Internet?

Tenore: Aggregating?

Rather: Yes.

The point is, they don't have what Alex Jones at Harvard has called the iron core of journalism, which is to stay staffs of reporters, including my own preference, particularly on international reporting or investigative reporting. This is labor-intensive work. I do think the Internet has added some value with bloggers sort of gathering up information for other people, but they don't have original reporting. By and large, it doesn't exist on the Internet. It feeds on itself, and on other established -- shrinking, but established -- news enterprises.

So we come back to the question of what do we do with this interim period? Now when I wrote the piece in The Washington Post, I admitted and acknowledged that I don't have the answer. I don't know of anybody who does have the answer. Some very good minds and a lot of bright people have tried to find the answer. So what I had is an idea. It was almost immediately rejected and it didn't go anywhere.

We have a crisis in one of our most important crafts -- businesses if you want to call it that. And in the past when we've had these crises, for the automobile business, for the early stages of the microchip business, for the steel business and what have you, it's not that unusual for the president to call together the best minds and say we may or may not have the government intervene.

I thought it would be a good idea for him to call together some of the brightest people in the country, including those in journalism but not confined to that, and say, let's see what we can do. An independent, -- a truly independent and truly free press, a fiercely independent but necessary press -- is the red beating heart of freedom and democracy, and it's absolutely essential to our system.

Now I did not call for the president to give government help and I did not want any laws passed. I don't want the government in newsrooms. It was immediately attacked as a move in that direction. I didn't intend it to be, and I think any reasonable person trying to be objective when they read what I proposed would come to that conclusion.

How do we preserve this vital business, this vital industry, this vital craft of the country, since it's absolutely essential? Whether it is, as Dan Rather thinks, in a crisis or not, it's clearly in serious trouble with newspapers closing, staffs cut. But the idea didn't go anywhere and I don't think it is going anywhere. So now I'm at the point where, OK that was my idea, now what's your idea? We're floundering at the moment and we're floundering in the midst of crisis.

Tenore: At the Democratic National Convention in 2008, you said the news is now filled with "so-called political debates, where the one thing assured not to happen is genuine debates and where the questions the public really cares about seldom seem to get asked." What do you think needs to be done to improve political coverage?

Rather: Well the first thing is that those of us who are in journalism, and I do not exclude myself from this criticism, need a spine transplant. I said it before and I'll say it again here. We need to suck it up and get back to delivering to the American people quality, integrity-filled journalism, in this case, applied specifically to political coverage. So much of political coverage is about the horse race -- who's up and who's down -- and that's generally based on polling.

You never me anybody who believes less in public opinion polls. They're valuable in that they can be a snapshot of a given moment, but the moment changes. But so much of the new coverage is, well, there's a new poll by Joe Blow and the poll shows so and so, and that passes for coverage. What's needed is deep digging, reporting of this sort that, for example, follows the money.

It's an old axiom in journalism, and a valid one: If you want to know what's really going on, as opposed to what others want you to believe is going on, then follow the dollar and the kind of political coverage that asks and seeks an answer to questions such as the following: Who is giving what to whom, expecting to get what? And that's just one example of where I think political coverage, including my own, needs drastic overhaul and improvement.

So number one is journalists need to get back to their business of being patriotic journalists in a free and democratic country and perform their function as watchdogs, as part of the system of checks and balances. We all know that huge sums of money are corrupting the whole political process, beginning with elections.

For example, the last presidential election in this country, when all was said and done and you put everything together, costs more than $2 billion. That's what was spent through the primaries, through the general election, all told. That money, not all of it came from special interests, but the bulk of it came from special interests -- big pharmaceutical companies, big broadcasting networks, television, radio, electronic, big labor -- and that's a very short list. But you have a more recent example here in Florida where just to win a primary, at least two candidates spend what, more than $50 million or $60 million of their own money. This has reached the serious out-of-whack stage.

So you say how can we improve coverage? Getting serious about where the money comes from, who gives it to whom, for what purpose -- and most of it is given for a purpose. The case can be made -- and I'm here to make it -- that very large, international corporations, conglomerates control the government, and I would include some elements of big labor in that.

The public is not well-served by political coverage as it is today. And I think it has to be noted, and there's no joy in noting this, that in many important ways, very big business is in bed with big government and whoever's in power in Washington, whether it be Republicans or Democrats -- not in the public interest, but in the business interest of the huge corporations and in the staying in power business of those in Washington. And this seriously affects news coverage.

Someone might say, well what is he talking about? Well let me give you an example. As recently as the 1950s, mid 1950s, there were more than 50 news enterprises, which is to say businesses, in the country that could accurately be described as having national distribution or large regional distribution.

Now, there are no more than six, and I would argue only four, very large conglomerate, international corporations who control more than 80 percent of the national distribution of news. This is out of whack. Let me pause and say I've never worked for anybody in the enterprise other than a profit-making enterprise. I believe in the capital system, but as applied to media, we have in no small degree monopolies now.

Now a great Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt did his party great service, and more importantly his country a great service, by breaking up the trust, which is to say the monopolies at the turn of the 20th century. ... I'm not a business person, but in the end I think they're not in the best interest of American business. I recognize that one gets criticized very heavily when get into this area, but I'm at the age and stage in my own career where I try to draw from my experience.

I love this country, I want the country to be better for my children and grandchildren as most Americans do. And when and if the public finally get focused on this -- that too few big international companies control too much of the national news distribution -- then I think it may change. But until the public really understands what is happening with this, and understands that it is not a special pleading of journalists such as myself, can we come back to a really vibrant, truly independent, fiercely independent press that is important to the survival of freedom and representing government as we know it.

Tenore: Along the lines of educating people on political matters, how effective do you think PolitiFact, and other efforts to fact-check political news, are?

Rather: Well, I applaud those efforts, and I certainly think they're worthwhile. You can put this under my opinion, but I think the facts in the ground bear it out, that up to and including now, their impact has been too minimal and too small. But God bless them for trying and may their tribe increase.

Tenore: So you don't think enough people know about them, then?

Rather: No, I don't think enough people know about them. I think their distribution and their readership is too small, and too diffused to make much of an impact, but I want to emphasize I admire what they do. This is what every good newspaper, every television station, every network ought to be doing. But in so many cases -- it's not unanimous, there are some exceptions -- but by and large, this is not what they do.

So often, particularly covering politics, enterprises describing themselves as journalistic enterprises, and journalists who describe themselves as journalists, have in fact become just transmission belts. The reporters are transcribers who transcribe what is said and just put it out there. And this is important to recognize. Let me back up again and say I include myself in this criticism, that we now know that in the run-up to the Iraq war, that not enough tough questions were asked, not nearly enough tough questions were asked.

Very few tough questions were asked, not enough facts were checked, not enough of the attitude that says, ok, this is what the government says is the situation, this is what the president says is the situation, now listen, let's put that against the known facts, let's try to find out some facts. I am not saying we wouldn't have gone to war with Iraq anyway. We might or we might not have. The point is, we never had a real national debate about it.

We accepted the government's view, and blindly accepting the government's, any government's view, leaves you open to propaganda. And what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war is that the administration of that time commanded the narrative, and the press bought that narrative. Anybody who didn't buy that narrative was sort of shunned off to the periphery. And this led, by any reasonable objective analysis, to a strategic blunder of historic proportions.

Tenore: You said in a UC Berkeley interview that you didn't realize the power of bloggers until a group of conservative bloggers questioned whether the documents were falsified and spread the news on the Web. I'm curious about what role you think bloggers, (or the so-called "Fifth Estate,") play in today's news media industry. Would you say their relationship with the mainstream media is symbiotic, or would you characterize it as being more adversarial?

Rather: Well, this may surprise some people, but I think on the whole and in general, the development of blogging has been a good development, that's number one. Number two, I think it's easy, perhaps a little too easy, to over estimate it and to over dramatize it.

After all, a blog is only one part of the huge Internet. The Internet does a lot of other things. I'd be happy at another time to discuss my own case, but this was an example of how a carefully orchestrated for partisan political and partisan ideological purposes can distort the facts and distort the truth.

I am not saying everybody who didn't like our report fits that category. But in discovery and deposition of the lawsuit that I filed, in the end, the appeals court in New York didn't let us go to trial. I wish we had. But it was clear to demonstrate in what discovery and in what depositions we did get, that the corporate entity, which is to say Viacom and CBS, did not handle this story and this case as CBS News had historically handled controversy and attacks from partisan, political operations.

But, whatever one thinks of my case and our story, your question has to do with the larger "blogosphere" as it's called. And put me down as saying, I think it has its problems. The biggest problem is accountability. That you can put anything on the Internet, and pretty much be assured of anonymity, or something close to anonymity, no matter what you say.

Let me say in an asterisk spot on the page, and with our story about George Bush's military record, the story was true. It was true then, it's true now, and evidence of that is neither the president nor anyone close around him, so far as I know, (and I think I would know if they had), has ever denied the narrative of the story, which led to such things as the then-president had defied a direct order to have a physical examination. He did not meet his requirements for the National Guard, he got an honorable discharge under circumstances which others without his name or influence would not have gotten.

I don't seek to go over this ground all over again, but I do think it's important to point out that the story was true, and for those who didn't like the story, for their partisan, political, or ideological reasons, that's the reason they had to attack it so fiercely and, as it turned out, yes so effectively, I'm sorry to say. But even with the documents, up to and including this time, no one has ever proven that the documents were not what they were purported to be. Could I be wrong about that? Yes, but nobody has ever proven it.

Again, I want to say I'm not here to retry the case. We took a big pounding, and some very good journalists who worked with me lost their careers over it. But having said all that, and pointing it out as an example of how the blogosphere and how the Internet can be used, for highly partisan, political and ideological purposes, most of it is not useful. But it comes back to the core problem, which is accountability. If you can manage your neighbor, you can say something really awful about them, that they molested children or something like that, and it spreads worldwide. It's not a fact and it has no basis in fact. But it's frequently impossible, if not always impossible, to prove what the source is.

Now, I think this problem, this weakness of the Internet and the blogosphere will eventually be addressed. I don't have the answer to it now. I'm not in favor of government control of it. I'm not in favor of censoring it. I think it needs to be free and open. I don't know how to deal with this problem.

And let's note that when you're in the newspaper, if you make that kind of accusation, either your name is on a story or it's easy to ascertain. It's public knowledge who wrote the story. And even with the letters to the editor, responsible newspapers require verification of who wrote the letter. So how to get this kind of accountability with the blogosphere and the Internet, I do see as a big problem. And I'm not in favor of government interference to solve it.

Tenore: In a Huffington Post story, you said that until recently, you had no idea what Twitter was. "Much of what we tweet, or post, or chat away at under the guise of news, are distractions," you wrote. Lots of journalists nowadays, though, use Twitter to report and disseminate stories. How important do you think social media is to today's journalism?

Rather: Well, it plays a very big role. But the term "social media" encompasses so much. It encompasses Facebook, Twitter, iTunes -- we can go down the list. Again, I think overall and in the main, that it's good. I don't twitter a lot, but I've become convinced by the people I work with that when one does what I do, you need to twitter. And we do have Facebook for the program for "Dan Rather Reports."

Do I have a personal Facebook? I don't think so. But that's not because I'm opposed. It's just there's so many hours in the day, and my desire and my destiny is to spend my time reporting, so for every minute I spend on Twitter or Facebook or some social media, it takes away from how I want to spend my life.

But I think it's increasingly important in politics and in business and in personal relationships to have these so-called social media. And I think there'll be more of them, not fewer. Some of them will go by the wayside. Twitter is the big thing now. Who knows what's going to be post-Twitter.

by Michael Goldfarb

London - For Michael Goldfarb each day begins as it always did up until July 2005. He wakes up an hour before his family, goes into his home office and reads his way through a minimum of five papers online making notes about possible stories to follow-up.

In other ways it is different. There is rarely a daily deadline to gear up for and no travel to a war zone to set up. There is work to do but it must be conjured up out of discipline or as the former public radio reporter puts it, "Routine is what gets people through prison, kidnapping, and rehabilitation from life threatening illness," he said in an interview with himself for this article. "It is the only thing that can get a person through being laid off."

We are walking in Springfield Park at the eastern edge of inner London near where he has made his home for almost twenty years. The park slopes steeply down to the River Lee, a narrow, embanked tributary of the Thames. Canal boats, canoes and sculls vie for space along the placid surface with a staggering variety of waterfowl. It is a slice of the English countryside that somehow has survived in the heart of the city.

The setting takes the edge off some painful reminiscences of what happened late one Friday evening exactly five years ago. Fifth anniversary look backs are a trope of journalism. The last one Michael Goldfarb did was in 2008 when he returned to northern Iraq to mark the fifth anniversary of the start of the war there. He laughs at the thought that his own anniversary is worth a story. But he is willing to tell it if it helps any of the thousands of other journalists who have been forced out of the business during the last few years.

The phone call came on a Friday, at the end of a grueling 24 hours when the reporter had been on the air at WBUR, the Boston NPR station, almost non-stop. A coordinated series of suicide bombing attacks on London's public transport system had left more than 50 people dead. Goldfarb covered the breaking news. A prescient documentary on Britain's jihadist groups he had done the year before - for which he won an Overseas Press Club Award - was being re-aired around the public radio system and he was doing interviews for other member stations.

When WBUR's news director got on the phone, Goldfarb admits he thought he was going to give him a pat on the back for a good day's work. Instead it was to tell him that after five years his position was being eliminated. That his job was under threat was not a surprise. The station had run up a $13 million dollar deficit, consultants Grant Thornton had been called in. But the announcement still provoked a visceral outburst.

"Blind rage. After more than a decade of miscarriages and IVF treatments my wife was two weeks from carrying our first baby to full term. The guys in Boston knew that. I was enraged that they would jeopardize the prospect of a healthy delivery with the kind of shock to the system that losing a job entails."

Goldfarb adds that other emotions that come with job loss - fear and bitterness - came later. "I imagine my story in outline is similar to thousands of others: I hired a lawyer, got a decent settlement and didn't think I had to rush into another situation. I wanted to consider other options. I got offered a job in LA, but the situation there wasn't quite what it seemed and it didn't pan out."

He spent time looking for teaching work. "I got asked whether I have a masters degree. I don't. When I suggested that in lieu of an MA they substitute 20 years of experience in which my work had won most of the major broadcast awards, plus a book that had just been named a New York Times Notable Book in lieu of an MA, I found that was not good enough."

By the time, the settlement money ran out he found himself in the riptide of journalism's Great Depression. "One by one foreign desks shut down. Today you can't get a minyan together for lunch at the American Association of Correspondents in London."

He rebuilt the freelance existence he had before going to work full-time with NPR in 1992. A contract to write a book titled "Emancipation" about the Jews coming out of the ghetto in 19th century Europe came with a decent advance and that provided a foundation. Making radio documentaries plus writing and reading essays for the BBC, work for Globalpost.com and the occasional voice-over filled in the rest.

"Emancipation" came out last autumn to good reviews but New York publishers are cutting back on serious non-fiction and no one has made an offer for his next proposal. "I feel like a cavalry officer who has had two horses shot out from under him in the same battle. Serious reporting, serious writing: where is the audience for it in America anymore? I know It's there, but the people who manage the news and book business have given up trying to serve it."

He writes every morning, regardless of having a book contract, but admits that there's a bit too much time to think about his career choice. The journalist confesses to occasionally second-guessing himself about whether he stayed in the business too long. He refers to two colleagues, "women I got to know covering the Balkans," who moved on from observation of events to participation in them one works for the Obama Administration. The other set up a kind of NGO.

"I understand what motivated them. Anyone who has covered our new world of war in which civilians, not enemy soldiers, are the main target has to be frustrated by the professional requirements of objective reporting. You often want to do something to help rather than just bear witness. I stayed with the job because I believe firmly in the educational function of journalism. I thought there was a profound social value in the work I did."

Goldfarb adds, "The questions Americans have had about the world since September 11th can't be answered by leaving the world uncovered."

He signed up with Globalpost.com before it launched because even if it didn't offer full-time employment, it offered an online platform to continue to educate Americans about the world.

Like everyone else connected to journalism Goldfarb spends a lot of time thinking about the changes brought by the Web. The reporter believes that on balance papers should be free online. "I do a BBC TV news discussion show once a month. If I know we're talking about Pakistan, which we do frequently, I can google 'Pakistan Newspapers' and up comes a page with links to 70 odd newspapers in that country and a note on which ones are written in English. They are all free. I read them to prepare for the show. Second example: while researching Emancipation I wanted to find out about Marcel Proust's role in the Dreyfus Affair - significant, by the way - and I came across something in the New York Times archive from, I think, 1897, which is almost certainly the earliest mention of Proust in America. This makes me a devotee of free and open access."

But that sort of thing does cost someone something. Surely, free is unsustainable. Goldfarb reminds a reporter that he spent most of his career in public radio. "Home of the free," as he calls it. Only about 15 percent of NPR's regular listeners actually answer the pledge drive call and it hasn't stopped NPR growing. He wonders why newspapers didn't implement a strategy years ago to make advertisers carry the freight for expansion onto the web.

"15 years ago, if the head of NBC had told the network's advertisers, new technology has created a platform that will increase our audience by a factor of ten and we will be adjusting our rate card appropriately, do you think he would have faced a rebellion? By a factor of how many has the New York Times' readership gone up? Surely, there should have been a way to increase rates and find new advertisers for on-line."

Goldfarb accepts that some form of charging is inevitable now but hopes that the powers that be remember how important archive access is. He suggests that if a paywall is put up at the New York Times it only be secure around news content for 72 hours - roughly the time it takes for a paper to go from immediacy to fish-wrapping - before free, open access to all.

Our walk has come to an end on a little pedestrian bridge arcing over the tranquil river scene. The reminiscences have stirred up feelings that are not so peaceful. "Although I try to fight it, I am bitter for all the personal reasons you can imagine. But I'm angry too, and that has nothing to do with my sense of personal loss.

"When I read about another philanthropist endowing a chair of journalism, I get very angry. The money would be better spent hiring laid off journalists to go into high schools to teach kids how to read newspapers because the big challenge to the future of journalism isn't the web, it's that more and more people reach adulthood without the habit of reading or listening to the news."

Why not do what so many others have done. Make a change in mid-career, get over it, move on. It's the American way, right?

"No, I'm stuck with it. I just believe in the redeeming social value of journalism. I am certain there are millions of people in the U.S. who are incredibly curious about the world and are underserved by existing news outlets - I mean how many full-time American foreign correspondents are left? Somewhere between one and two hundred? You can't inform American society about the world with so few. People based overseas look at the U.S. today and are simply aghast at the ignorance of the world which is displayed there daily, from the upper echelons of government down to the street. So I carry on. I commit as much journalism today as I ever did, I just earn 50 percent less doing it."

He pauses and anger, bitterness and perplexed pride bubble up. "I wonder about the consultants at McKinsey or Grant Thornton, what is their metric for that? How do they assign a numerical value to a person's profound dedication to the practice of journalism?"

The reporter intends to carry on, despite the economic absurdity. "I'm reading about Confucius for the new book I'm researching. He, too, at the age of 50 was forced out of work. Confucius told his pupils later, 'When employed, practice your way. When set aside, treasure your way.'"

The Interview over Goldfarb says to himself, "Think I'll use that for my kicker."

- 30 -

Motorola has outed the MILESTONE 2, and as you might expect it’s both the successor to the original MILESTONE and the GSM version of the DROID 2.  As such, it gets the same 3.7-inch 854 x 480 touchscreen, Android 2.2, 5-megapixel camera and slide-out QWERTY keyboard, with the improved and redesigned keys.

There’s also support for Flash Player 10.1, thanks to Froyo, but unlike the original MILESTONE Motorola has slapped its MOTOBLUR social networking system onto the phone.  We can’t say we’re especially excited about that, since it generally means future Android updates come later, but given Motorola has been dragging its feet with a new ROM for the original MILESTONE we guess it might end up making no difference whatsoever.

Elsewhere there’s a 1GHz processor, WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth and a microSD card slot, together with a 3.5mm headphone socket, 8GB of integrated storage and a bundled 8GB memory card.  The Motorola MILESTONE 2 will arrive in Europe in Q4, price yet to be announced.

Press Release:

Motorola MILESTONE™ 2 Gives You More for all your Smartphone Needs
September 01, 2010

BASINGSTOKE, September 1, 2010 –– Motorola today introduced MILESTONE™ 2 enhanced with MOTOBLUR™. The Android™ 2.2 device offers more speed, more connectivity, more messaging, more storage, more web with Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1, more multimedia and more personalisation than the original award-winning MILESTONE.

The powerhouse device features a 1Ghz processor, allowing users to sift through their content quickly, even when running multiple applications simultaneously or a number of open web browser pages. Respond to e-mails or texts quickly with an improved and more spacious QWERTY keyboard including larger keys and better tactility for easier typing. MILESTONE 2 also acts as a 3G mobile hotspot1 to connect up to five WiFi® enabled devices, so you turn practically anywhere into a hive of productivity.

“MILESTONE 2 offers more power, more speed, with an improved keyboard, so users can send, access and share information even quicker than before to manage their work and personal life,” said Alain Mutricy, senior vice president, portfolio and device product management, Motorola Mobility. “This introduction not only reaffirms our commitment to innovate on Android but offers consumers the leading edge features they crave including fast web browsing, messaging, application downloads and multimedia.”

MILESTONE 2 also features the latest version of Motorola’s unique solution, MOTOBLUR, which makes it even easier to manage all of your emails, messages and social updates in one easy place with the additions of filtering, resizable widgets, added corporate security and a versatile battery manager.

Further enhancements to the original MILESTONE include 720p HD video capture and playback allowing you to capture life’s moments in crystal clear detail, whilst the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 allows mobile users to experience millions of rich websites the way they were meant to be seen, including rich video and gaming content, and you can share all of your multimedia with DLNA compatible devices. The experience is rounded off with a connected music player delivering lyrics to your songs, additional artist news and information, as well as integrated social applications for sharing and giving recommendations. Users will have plenty of room for their content with up to 8GB internal memory and an 8GB microSD card inbox, expandable to 32GB.

A suite of Google™ mobile applications including Google Search™, Google Maps™, Gmail™ and YouTube™ are also integrated onto the device. Plus you have access to Android Market™ which has more than 70,000 applications.

Smart Accessories

The device ships with an 8GB micro SD card and wired headset, and owners can also download free the Motorola Media Link software that makes transferring your music and other multimedia from computer to phone even easier.

Make the most of Motorola’s MILESTONE 2 at home, in the car or at the office with the optional smart accessories:

The car cradle is ready for the road. Simply drop in your MILESTONE 2 or original MILESTONE and it automatically turns into car mode. This gives one-touch access to your favourite in-car applications, including your handsfree calling contacts, your music, internet radio, podcasts, Google Maps™ with Navigation™ and more. Plug, play, drive and charge your MILESTONE 2 with the rapid in car charger that plugs into your cradle
The multimedia station is a stylish dock for your MILESTONE 2 or original MILESTONE. When docked, your phone automatically changes to desktop mode showing alarm clock and favourite multimedia applications such as a slide show of pictures. Desktop mode can be personalised allowing you to show the applications you want, all whilst charging your device.
Key MILESTONE 2 features include:

1Ghz processor now with 802.11n support
3G mobile hotspot – connect up to five other Wi-Fi devices
Latest version of MOTOBLUR
Adobe Flash Player 10.1
Multi-touch, pinch to zoom, double tap zoom
720p HD video capture and playback
5MP imager with dual LED flash
Up to 40GB of memory
3.5mm audio jack
Enterprise Exchange support
Improved design; more spacious QWERTY keyboard including larger keys and better tactility
DLNA / WiFi / Bluetooth® 2.1 connectivity
Additional functionality and apps include:

Full suite of the Google applications: Google Search, Google Maps with Latitude and Street View, Gmail, YouTube, and Google Talk™
Unified Google and Exchange Contacts
Navigation: GPS, Google Maps, E-Compass Latitude
Email Support: IMAP/POP3, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Corporate Sync, Push Email
Quick Office document viewer
IM Support: Google Talk
Calendar: Exchange, Calendar
Availability

MILESTONE 2 will be available in Europe beginning Q4 2010.

---

Relevant Entries on SlashGear

• Motorola MILESTONE (aka GSM DROID) adds multitouch [Video]
• Motorola MILESTONE Expansys preorder confirms December 7th ship date
• Motorola MILESTONE gets second German carrier: Vodafone
• Motorola MILESTONE official: DROID for Europe
• Motorola DEXT and Milestone getting Android 2.1 too

Emmis Communications Further Extends Preferred Stock Exchange Offer and Adjourns Special Shareholder Meeting

PR Newswire — August 9, 2010

INDIANAPOLIS, Aug. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Emmis Communications Corporation (Nasdaq: EMMS), an Indiana corporation (“Emmis”), today announced that it is further extending its offer to issue 12% PIK Senior Subordinated Notes due 2017 (“New Notes”) in exchange for Emmis’ 6.25% Series A Cumulative Convertible Preferred Stock (“Preferred Stock”) at a rate of $30.00 principal amount of New Notes for each $50.00 of liquidation preference of Preferred Stock until 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on Friday, August 13, 2010. The exchange offer, as previously extended, was originally scheduled to expire at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on Friday, August 6, 2010.

Emmis also announced that the special meeting of Emmis shareholders held at 6:30 p.m., local time, on Friday, August 6, 2010, to vote on certain amendments to the terms of the Preferred Stock, was adjourned until 6:30 p.m., local time, on Friday, August 13, 2010, at One Emmis Plaza, 40 Monument Circle, Indianapolis, Indiana 46204.

Emmis has been informed that JS Acquisition, Inc., an Indiana corporation (“JS Acquisition”) whose equity securities are owned entirely by Mr. Jeffrey H. Smulyan, the Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of Emmis, and JS Acquisition, LLC, an Indiana limited liability company (“JS Parent”) that is wholly owned by Mr. Smulyan, is further extending its tender offer to purchase all of Emmis’ outstanding shares of Class A common stock for $2.40 per share in cash until 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on Friday, August 13, 2010. The tender offer, as previously extended, was originally scheduled to expire at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on Friday, August 6, 2010.

The offers are being further extended because Emmis, JS Parent, JS Acquisition, Mr. Smulyan and certain other interested parties have been unable to date to reach an agreement in negotiations with a group of holders of Preferred Stock that owns approximately 38.3% of the outstanding shares of Preferred Stock in the aggregate, and who have previously advised Emmis and Mr. Smulyan that they would vote against the amendments to the terms of the Preferred Stock at the special meeting. During the extension, JS Parent, JS Acquisition and Mr. Smulyan are continuing to negotiate with that group and are also considering other options, including an alternative structure that would still allow a tender offer for the Class A Common Stock to proceed without any changes to the terms of the Preferred Stock and without an offer by Emmis to exchange the New Notes for the Preferred Stock. There can be no assurance that either an agreement will be reached with the group of holders of Preferred Stock or that an alternative structure can be implemented.

As of 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on Friday, August 6, 2010, 516,065 shares of Preferred Stock had been tendered into and not withdrawn from the exchange offer. In addition, as of 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on Friday, August 6, 2010, 20,234,775 Class A shares had been tendered into and not withdrawn from the tender offer. If not withdrawn at or prior to the expiration of the tender offer, such shares would satisfy the Minimum Tender Condition.

About Emmis

Emmis Communications Corporation is a diversified media company, principally focused on radio broadcasting. Emmis operates the 8th largest publicly traded radio portfolio in the United States based on total listeners. As of February 28, 2010, Emmis owns and operates seven FM radio stations serving the nation’s top three markets — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, although one of Emmis’ FM radio stations in Los Angeles is operated pursuant to a Local Marketing Agreement whereby a third party provides the programming for the station and sells all advertising within that programming. Additionally, Emmis owns and operates fourteen FM and two AM radio stations with strong positions in St. Louis, Austin (Emmis has a 50.1% controlling interest in Emmis’ radio stations located there), Indianapolis and Terre Haute, IN.

In addition to Emmis’ domestic radio properties, Emmis operates an international radio business and publishes several city and regional magazines. Internationally, Emmis owns and operates national radio networks in Slovakia and Bulgaria. Emmis’ publishing operations consists of Texas Monthly, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Indianapolis Monthly, Cincinnati, Orange Coast,and Country Samplerand related magazines. Emmis also engages in various businesses ancillary to Emmis’ broadcasting business, such as website design and development, broadcast tower leasing and operating a news information radio network in Indiana.

Emmis’ news releases and other information are available on the company’s website at www.emmis.com.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

THIS PRESS RELEASE IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN OFFER TO PURCHASE OR EXCHANGE OR THE SOLICITATION OF AN OFFER TO SELL OR EXCHANGE CLASS A COMMON STOCK, PREFERRED STOCK, STOCK OPTIONS, RESTRICTED STOCK, DEBT OR OTHER SECURITIES OF EMMIS.

JS ACQUISITION HAS COMMENCED AN OFFER TO PURCHASE SHARES OF CLASS A COMMON STOCK OF EMMIS (THE “TENDER OFFER”) PURSUANT TO THE OFFER TO PURCHASE AND RELATED LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL, DATED JUNE 2, 2010 (TOGETHER WITH AMENDMENTS AND SUPPLEMENTS THERETO, THE “TENDER OFFER DOCUMENTS”) THAT WAS FILED UNDER COVER OF A COMBINED SCHEDULE TO/13E-3 TRANSACTION STATEMENT WITH THE UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION (THE “SEC”). THE TENDER OFFER DOCUMENTS HAVE BEEN DISTRIBUTED TO EMMIS’ SHAREHOLDERS. THIS PRESS RELEASE IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR THE TENDER OFFER DOCUMENTS.

IN CONNECTION WITH THE TENDER OFFER, EMMIS HAS COMMENCED AN OFFER TO ISSUE NEW 12% PIK SENIOR SUBORDINATED NOTES DUE 2017 IN EXCHANGE FOR EMMIS’ 6.25% SERIES A CUMULATIVE CONVERTIBLE PREFERRED STOCK (THE “EXCHANGE OFFER”). ALSO, IN CONNECTION WITH THE EXCHANGE OFFER AND THE TENDER OFFER, EMMIS IS SOLICITING PROXIES (THE “PROXY SOLICITATION”) FROM ITS COMMON AND PREFERRED SHAREHOLDERS TO VOTE IN FAVOR OF CERTAIN PROPOSED AMENDMENTS TO EMMIS’ ARTICLES OF INCORPORATION. THE EXCHANGE OFFER AND PROXY SOLICITATION HAVE BOTH COMMENCED PURSUANT TO A DEFINITIVE OFFER TO EXCHANGE, DEFINITIVE PROXY STATEMENT AND THEIR RESPECTIVE LETTERS OF TRANSMITTAL AND OTHER RELATED MATERIALS, DATED JULY 6, 2010 (TOGETHER WITH AMENDMENTS AND SUPPLEMENTS THERETO, THE “EXCHANGE OFFER DOCUMENTS”, AND COLLECTIVELY WITH THE TENDER OFFER DOCUMENTS, THE “DISCLOSURE DOCUMENTS”) THAT WERE FILED UNDER COVER OF A COMBINED SCHEDULE TO/SCHEDULE 13E-3 TRANSACTION STATEMENT WITH THE SEC. THE EXCHANGE OFFER DOCUMENTS HAVE BEEN DISTRIBUTED TO EMMIS’ SHAREHOLDERS, AND THIS PRESS RELEASE IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR THE EXCHANGE OFFER DOCUMENTS.

SHAREHOLDERS AND INVESTORS SHOULD READ CAREFULLY THE DISCLOSURE DOCUMENTS BECAUSE THEY CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION, INCLUDING THE VARIOUS TERMS OF, AND CONDITIONS TO THE TENDER OFFER, THE EXCHANGE OFFER AND THE PROXY SOLICITATION (THE “TRANSACTIONS”). INVESTORS MAY OBTAIN FREE COPIES OF THE DISCLOSURE DOCUMENTS, INCLUDING THE LETTERS OF TRANSMITTAL, AT THE SEC’S WEB SITE AT WWW.SEC.GOV. IN ADDITION, COPIES OF THE DISCLOSURE DOCUMENTS, INCLUDING THE LETTERS OF TRANSMITTAL, MAY BE OBTAINED FOR FREE BY DIRECTING SUCH REQUESTS TO BNY SHAREOWNER SERVICES, THE INFORMATION AGENT FOR THE TRANSACTIONS, AT 1-866-301-0524. SHAREHOLDERS ARE URGED TO CAREFULLY READ THESE MATERIALS PRIOR TO MAKING ANY DECISION WITH RESPECT TO THE TRANSACTIONS.

EMMIS AND ITS DIRECTORS AND OFFICERS AND OTHER MEMBERS OF MANAGEMENT AND EMPLOYEES MAY BE DEEMED TO BE PARTICIPANTS IN THE SOLICITATION OF PROXIES. INFORMATION REGARDING EMMIS’ DIRECTORS AND EXECUTIVE OFFICERS IS DETAILED IN ITS PROXY STATEMENTS AND ANNUAL REPORTS ON FORM 10-K. SUCH INFORMATION IS ALSO CONTAINED IN THE EXCHANGE OFFER DOCUMENTS.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release includes information that could constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements include, among others, statements about Emmis’ beliefs, plans, objectives, goals, expectations, estimates and intentions that are subject to significant risks and uncertainties and are subject to change based on various factors, many of which are beyond our control. The words “may,” “could,” “should,” “would,” “believe,” “anticipate,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “plan,” “target,” “goal,” and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements, by their nature, are subject to risks and uncertainties. Although Emmis believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, Emmis’ actual results could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.

Emmis’ ability to achieve its objectives could be adversely affected by the factors discussed in its Annual Report on Form 10-K, as amended, for the fiscal year ended February 28, 2010 and Definitive Proxy Statement/Offer to Exchange filed with the SEC on July 6, 2010, as well as, among others: (1) the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstances that could give rise to the inability to complete the proposed transactions described above due to the failure to satisfy the conditions required to complete the proposed transactions, (2) the outcome of any legal proceedings that have been and may be instituted against Emmis and others following announcement of the proposed transactions, (3) the ability to recognize the benefits of the proposed transactions, (4) the amount of the costs, fees, expenses and charges related to the proposed transactions, (5) general industry conditions such as the competitive environment, (6) regulatory matters and risks, (7) legislative developments, (8) changes in tax and other laws and the effect of changes in general economic conditions, (9) the risk that a condition to closing of the proposed transactions may not be satisfied, and (10) other risks to consummation of the proposed transactions, including the risk that the proposed transactions will not be consummated within the expected time period.

Many of the factors that will determine the outcome of the subject matter of this press release are beyond Emmis’ ability to control or predict. Emmis undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements, or to make any other forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as otherwise required by law. Additional information regarding these risk factors and uncertainties is detailed from time to time in Emmis’ filings with the SEC, including but not limited to its Annual Report on Form 10-K, as amended, for the fiscal year ended February 28, 2010 and Definitive Proxy Statement/Offer to Exchange filed with the SEC on July 6, 2010. These filings are also available for viewing on Emmis’ website. To access this information on Emmis’ website, please visit www.emmis.com and click on “Investors”, “SEC Filings”.

Contact: Patrick M. Walsh Ryan A. Hornaday 317-266-0100

SOURCE Emmis Communications Corporation

Subject Codes: PC/t.100809084501346, PT/lang.en, PC/ticker, IN/RAD, IN/MLM, IN/PUB, IN/MAG, IN/ENT, SU/TNM, RE/Indiana, PC/priority.r, PC/category.f, PC/class.1242, PC/WAVO_….e., PC/APT_….e, PC/trade_e, PC/wavo5_e, PC/class.1134, PC/class.1278, PC/DataFeat_enter, PC/port_32, PC/Billing_FC1, PC/Billing_IND, PC/Billing_IRW, PC/Billing_RWB, PC/Billing_TNW, PC/1stAcc_956558, PC/bureau_CL, PC/port_01, PC/port_96, PC/port_31, PC/port_33, PC/port_19, PC/port_91, PC/contact, PC/website, PC/id_CL47664

Company Codes: NASDAQ-NMS:EMMS

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If you'd asked historians Brian Balogh, Peter Onuf, and Ed Ayers six years ago how they'd feel about becoming popular radio personalities, they would have laughed it off as a joke. Well, in fact, someone did ask, and they did laugh. Heartily.

At the time, all three were employed at the University of Virginia as accomplished colleagues who collectively had penned enough books to fill a small library and had garnered enough honors-- academic and literary-- to wallpaper any remaining walls in that library.

But host a radio show?

"I thought it was crazy," laughs Ayers, now president of the University of Richmond.

"I don't think history is funny," Onuf says he replied when the idea for what would become BackStory with the American History Guys was first floated past him following a history symposium at which he and Ayers had presented.

And Balogh says the idea seemed so terrible at first that, in a strange way, he couldn't resist.

"It was pitched in a way that made me laugh and convinced me it would never work," he recalls, admitting he agreed only because it sounded like it would be fun-- at least until it failed. "How bad could it be to sit around and talk about history?" he wondered.

Since the first episode aired in June 2008 on a single station, the show has racked up rave reviews and awards from organizations such as the Federation of State Humanities Councils and Public Radio Exchange. Early on, it was singled out on iTunes as a "staff favorite," and the latest holiday show, "Naughty and Nice," held the front page of the iTunes Store's podcast page, leading to almost 90,000 downloads and helping the show earn sponsorship by the History Channel.

Perhaps more significantly, it's built an ever increasing listenership. The show's July 4, 2009 episode, "Independence Daze," aired on twenty-seven public radio stations from Cape Cod to Sioux City to San Francisco, and introduced listeners to the history behind America's most patriotic holiday and the traditions that accompany it. The show has been carried on 86 stations in 35 states plus the District of Columbia.

If the show's executive producer has his way, the "guys"-- Onuf is "Eighteenth-Century Guy," Ayers is "Nineteenth-Century Guy" and Balogh is "Twentieth-Century Guy"-- will soon be on air weekly in all 50 states, bantering, interviewing prestigious intellectuals and common folk, taking calls from listeners, and, most importantly, says Onuf, "having a ball."

The show's success has been surprising even to the man who first envisioned it as he was exploring opportunities in radio programming at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in the fall of 2004.

"I knew both Ed and Peter," says Andrew Wyndham, director of media programs at VFH and BackStory's executive producer. "They're both brilliant guys," he says, "and I thought, if these two came together, we could have the makings of an extraordinary radio show, given their chemistry."

After some initial good-humored resistance, in the summer of 2005 Ayers and Onuf agreed to give the show a try-- but with one caveat.

"They both said we need a third guy who will be our twentieth-century expert," Wyndham recalls. Ayers and Onuf already had that expert in mind: their UVA history department colleague and Ayers's basketball buddy, Brian Balogh.
"I was a little worried about having three voices," Wyndham admits, but when Balogh arrived for a meeting with Ayers, Onuf, and Wyndham to discuss the idea, "it was obvious that they really set off each other's energy-- it was happening right there in front of me," Wyndham says. "They were making quips, coming up with ideas, generating thought after thought."

Settling on the show's hosts, however, would prove to be the lowest hurdle to leap as the four worked to take the concept from inception to airwaves.

By spring 2006, they'd created a 30-minute demo called The History Guys, featuring questions from callers and several regular segments, including "Gear from Yesteryear," examining technology and tools from the past, and "Kidding Around with History," featuring children and teens. That first foray won them their first grant: $30,000 from UVA alumni through the office of UVA's president. A year later, an expanded one-hour prototype reaped even more money: $130,000 from another UVA fund, plus several individual donations.

But when they submitted their sample to various public radio stations for feedback, the reception, Wyndham says, wasn't as warm.

"They came back to us and said, ‘There's potential here, but it's not there yet.'"

Among the suggestions: that each episode needed a coherent theme and that the three hosts needed to "differentiate." And that wasn't all.

"The biggest suggestion was to have a dedicated staff of people who have experience in producing shows and who can make this sing," says Wyndham, who raised enough money to hire three full-time radio professionals, including the show's producer, Tony Field, in early 2008. 

"The challenge with these guys has been working with them to find their voice as radio professionals instead of as professors," says Field, who'd been an associate producer at On the Media, a one-hour National Public Radio show offering media criticism and analysis. Since his hiring, Field also has worked to develop a vibrant and interactive web presence for the new show at backstoryradio.org. But there's a flip side to that challenge as well.

"A lot of exciting opportunities have presented themselves because of that," says Field, explaining that many of the intellectual powerhouses guesting on the show are lured in by the idea of being interviewed by fellow scholars instead of journalists and radio hosts.

"There's a little more spontaneity and a little more seriousness" in the interviews, says Yale history professor David Blight, an authority on the U.S. Civil War, whose interview on the "Independence Daze" episode covered Frederick Douglass's famed 1852 Fourth of July speech in which the freed slave offered his audience the scathing reminder that, because of his skin color, "the Fourth of July is yours, not mine."

The three hosts of BackStory "are taking talk radio and TV culture," says Blight, "and infusing it with some serious historical understanding."

Which isn't to say the guys understand everything. In that same July 4 episode, a caller asks why the 1812 Overture, by the Russian composer Tchaikovsky, is associated with America's holiday.

"We looked at each other, pointed at each other," says Balogh, admitting the question stumped all three. "We don't pretend to be experts on everything under the sun." (It turns out that a July 4, 1974, performance of the overture by the Arthur Fiedler-conducted Boston Pops Orchestra, accompanied by cannons and fireworks, sparked the tradition.)

Although the history of holidays have anchored several BackStory episodes, other episodes take a ripped from-the-headlines approach including "Panic! A history of Financial Crisis," "From Whales to Wind: A History of Energy," and "The More Things Change: The History of Presidential Transitions."

But sometimes, serendipity creates its own drama. For Ayers, it was a surprise caller during their Mother's Day program. 

"They said, ‘It's Billie from Kingsport, Tennessee,'" laughs Ayers. He admits it took him a moment to realize that the caller who asked, "What do three men know about motherhood, anyway?" was Ayers's own octogenarian mother, a retired teacher, who then discussed with the guys the merits of mothers working versus staying at home.

In the course of that program, the guys addressed a question from another caller, who was planning to conceive, and wondered when the societal pressure to be a perfect mother began. For the record, the guys agree that the pressure likely started in the nineteenth century, when a mother's role was essentially that of a "proto-Harvard business school"-- raising boys into men who would be leaders in society. Girls, the guys noted, also needed an education so they would later be able to raise their own accomplished sons.

During the show's Memorial Day episode on the history of death and mourning, Ayers says, he visited a very special grave site: his own. The University of Richmond has a special plot for deceased presidents in historic Hollywood Cemetery.

"That's what I like about the show," says Ayers, a Yale graduate with a Tennessee twang. "It doesn't take itself too seriously."

Balogh, too, holds one show at least slightly above the rest: the Thanksgiving program in which he interviewed his sports idol, 1970s Dallas Cowboys legend Roger Staubach, to find out what it was like to have spent a decade of Thanksgivings on the gridiron. "I don't get to interview Roger Staubach every day," he notes.

For Onuf, the joy of interviewing guests is at least matched by the pleasure of the studio repartee, a pleasure that's obvious as the three men banter during a summer recording session, ribbing each other over whose century is superior until a producer reins them in.

"The thing I love most is when we surprise each other, including ourselves, with something weird, off-the-wall, some weird angle," Onuf says. "The times when we're doing our chops as historians. There's that kind of excitement."

Such chops are on display in a year-ago episode, "Black & White: The Idea of Racial Purity," when Balogh asks his two cohosts about the origins of the concept of race.

They trace it from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when ethnicity was a far more powerful defining force than race, through slavery and emancipation, and on into the twentieth century. They discuss the 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia, which declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional, and note that themes of racial identity became increasingly common in works by twentieth-century authors, including William Faulkner and George Orwell.

Yet for all the intellectual stimulation the show offers its hosts, it places grueling demands on their time, particularly considering all three men are already gainfully employed. Eight to 10 hours of studio recordings are edited to fit into each one-hour episode; and there have been several times when it appeared the show might itself have become history.

Nearly three years ago-- as they were struggling to retool the show's format-- Ayers assumed the presidency at the University of Richmond following his tenure as dean of UVA's School of Arts and Sciences. The move and long hours at the new job threatened to derail the fledgling radio program. Onuf soon chimed in with some news of his own: He'd been offered a visiting professorship at Oxford University in England.

"I really thought that might be it," says Wyndham.

In stepped what might be considered "Twenty-first-Century Guy": technology.

Setting up home sound studios for Onuf in England and Ayers in Richmond allowed recording to continue. "I've been surprised," Balough says, "at how easily we adapted to being in three different places."

And with Onuf now returned from his year overseas and Ayers just an hour away from the show's Charlottesville home base, the future of BackStory, says Wyndham, looks especially bright. Various grants and donations have allowed the program to meet its current $190,000 annual budget, and the guys have taken the show on the road. Last June, they recorded before a live audience in Charlottesville, and since then have done live shows in New Hampshire, Richmond, and again in Charlottesville at Monticello, with an additional recording scheduled for October in Colonial Williamsburg.

Wyndham hopes BackStory will run weekly by next summer and that they'll be able to convince the eighty-six stations that have already carried at least one episode to sign on permanently, although he acknowledges the current economic climate means meeting that goal won't be a cakewalk. "It's a tough time to be breaking in a new show in public radio," he sighs.

For their parts, Balogh, Onuf, and Ayers seem to have made peace with their unexpected success-- even as the show's growth may put increasing demands on their already limited time.

"I put that in the ‘trouble in paradise' category," says Balogh.

Six years after they were first asked what seemed to be a silly question, indeed, they are well on their way to becoming radio stars. And, to their great delight, all three guys are still laughing.

~

Hook senior editor Courteney Stuart originally penned a version of this story for the November/December issue of Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment of the Humanities.

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