In a recent article about the future of journalism, The Economist magazine cites a news editor who claims that too many people in the industry are out of touch with the common people.  I hate to say it, but that might actually be true.

Sadly, journalism has really reached a point of “edutainment saturation.”  When did we journalists walk away from that fire-in-the-belly reporting that launched such great historic moments (albeit bloody ones) as the French or Russian Revolutions, the downfall of Nixon, or just recently, the cruxifiction of Karlheinz Schrieber and Brian Mulroney.  Now, it always seems about getting the shock value.

Others in the industry are even less optimistic.  I found an article on soundscapes.info that in no uncertain terms says journalism is a dying art, and will not live to see any kind of future.  Personally, I’m not that pessimistic, but I think that as journalists, we need to return to a simpler, almost egalitarian way of doing things.  It’s not like I’m promoting technological xenophobia, but I do think there needs to be a curb somewhere in there.

For anyone with the testicular fortitude to read the condemning article on journalism’s future, here’s the link:

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/EDITORIAL/oped0701.shtml

One of my journalism profs recently presented us with the question of how much information is too much information for human beings to process.  In his classes, one can look around and see some people with their eyes locked on the professor, others are immersed in their laptops, and others manage to do both.  So the question is: where doesone draw the line?  Where does it stop being about learning and more about just being “plugged-in?”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I myself am a case in point.  I come from the Eastern European school of learning (i.e. when you’re in class, your eyes are locked on the teacher at all times), but in recent times, I’ve had so many disparate things calling upon my attention that it isn’t always the case.  As a writer, I’m under constant deadlines.  So while my prof is giving us a lesson, my computer might be actively running searches through university archives for source material for me; or as a journalism residency student, I may be waiting on an important source to get back to me.

As much as I hate to admit it, I think this whole issue is relative to each person.  We’re all programmed differently, so we can all handle different levels of information.  I guess it boils down to whether or not you’re able to successfully process all that info.  If so, kudos.  If not, why are you wasting your time dividing your attention and not giving yourself the benefit of doing fewer jobs well with more focus?

 The University of Toronto’s psychology department did a study back in 2000, testing students and their ability to process under divided attention.  As a bit of a science nerd, I rather enjoyed it.  Maybe you will too:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=10868332&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google

A recent issue that has come up, yet again, is the whole idea of journalists reporting just the facts.  This is a sticky one.  I mean, first of all, who draws the line and where about what is fact and what is opinion?  Then there’s the deeper question of whether or not it’s ethically permissible to report certain facts. Is it ethical to report the details of a grizzly murder, or troops movements during a time of war?  Well, in the United States anyway, it is.  If memory serves, Abraham Lincoln wanted to prosecute a journalist who had published troops movements during the American Civil War.  The case never went to trial, but the question still remains.   Ultimately, I think it is a very slippery slope, and I don’t envy anyone of being the position of having to decide what is and what isn’t ethical to report factually.  I guess it ultimately comes down to whether or not you can slip with yourself at night, or at least the reasoning goes in this liberal, anything-goes world we’re living. For anyone interested, here’s a link about journalists reporting the facts in the States.Enjoy!http://www.rcfp.org/news/mag/30-3/lib-reportin.html 

Well everyone, The time has finally come.  At long last, I have finished my final assignment for my social journalism class.  How does it tie in with my writing, you ask?  It is a picture slideshow of the main characters in my latest book.  For your viewing pleasure, may I present, The Five Crowns:     

Ok, this has nothing to do with my literary blog, but this is a test for a video blog: 

Greetings all!

Much has happened over the last week that I need to bring you up to speed on.  I’m still waiting for my final draft to be approved by my editing team, but the course my writing has been taking is about to change.  I spoke with my liaison last week, and she told me that everything in the literary world is gearing up for a change.  “What change?” you ask.  Well…

Up until now, I have defied the odds, and made it this far without an agent.  Literary agents are extremely difficult to acquire, and they don’t function the same way as a talent or acting agent.  But my liaison informed me that pretty much every big-name publisher is requiring authors to have agents, no exceptions.  She went on to tell me that she can’t guarantee that Random House will even look at my manuscript anymore.  So I found that rather discouraging at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that getting an agent really is a good idea.  It means I don’t have to try and sell my manuscript to insignificant, no-name publishers, but that soon, I might actually be welcomed into the bull-pen of literary heavyweights.

I’ve contacted three agencies so far, and been declined by one who stated that since she was going on maternity leave, she was not taking on any more clients “in the interim.”  But that’s fine by me.  Truth be told, she was my last choice anyway.  The other two I emailed were equally my top choices, and I am quite aware of the huge successes of many of the clients they have represented.  So when all is said and done, hopefully next week I will have some exciting news!

Cheers

You know, a theme that has been popping up a lot recently is ethics in media, a term I use broadly.  When I say media, I mean books (obviously), but also in music, journalism, and the like.  On a personal level though, this is something I’m being confronted with on a weekly, and sometimes daily, basis.

In college right now, I have an entire class about ethics in journalism, but as a writer, I’ve been faced with the dilemma of ethics from the day I first put pen to paper.  In the literary field, especially in historic or biographical literature, citing your sources, and doing it properly is hugely import, and the law agrees.

In my social journalism class, we recently looked at the example of removing a blemish from a flower and whether or not that was ethical.  The truth is, I don’t know.  A few weeks ago, I handed in a report outlining what I believed where the do’s and don’t’s of image doctering, and frankly, removing an unnecessary blemish from a flower falls into the fair game category.  I mean, unless it completely changes the context or perception of the image, I don’t see an issue, but I’ve got an ethical quandry for you now, blogfans, and that comes down to citing your sources: is it ethical to claim you got information from a source you actually didn’t?

Now hold the phone a minute, I don’t mean plagiarism!  But think about it for a second, you take a history book, like the recent New York Times bestseller Marie Antoinette, by Antonia Fraser.  It has a bibliography that’s thirteen pages long (my own is eight!)  Ms. Fraser has drawn on literally hundreds of sources that have drawn on other sources that have drawn on the original context or work.  So, is it ethical to bypass the middle man and simply quote from the original text?

The more I think about it, the more I’m of two minds on the subject.  On the one hand, I think that if you’ve got that original source material in front of you, why not?  Personally, I’ve read passages from Fraser’s book or Evelyne Lever’s highly popular Marie Antoinette: La Derniere Reine de France and then gone and read some of the very material she herself used.  Doesn’t sound necessarily wrong to use what’s right in front of you, am I wrong?

But then there’s the other side of the coin.  Say you don’t bother going to look that information up yourself, and decide to just use another author’s research and say you did look it up yourself, doesn’t that discredit and take away from the time and energy they put into it.  I have to say, ten years from now, I don’t know how I’d feel about someone taking my bibliography and saying they looked at all those sources without at least looking up the information to see from themselves.  There’s some food for thought.

Norcadia

It’s about 4:07 p.m. and I’m lying in bed watching Frasier.  ”Why lying?” you ask?  Sadly, everyone’s favourite, albeit unknown, author has been sick with the stomach flu.  I’ll be off classes for the rest of the week, but I’ve had the chance to do some deep thinking about me vis a vis the writing world.I’ve decided, in an abundance of caution, to decline the publishing offer from the shady PublishAmerica.  They jumped at my manuscript so quickly, but the more research I did, the more I discovered claims of breach of contract, false advertising, and unethical conduct, to say the least.  I tried to take it all in stride, but when I came across an article from the Washington Post that confirmed all that, I said (politely) thanks but no thanks.  I’ll be sticking with RandomHouse, the Central European University Press, or one of the other publishers who have said they’re interested in my latest manuscript.Truth be told, I don’t have a great lot of news on this front for the moment.  My editing team hasn’t finished looking at the final draft of the manuscript, so right now I’m just sitting around and waiting, and unfortunately, I’m still too weak to be able to sit up and do a lot of research on Into the Abyss, but there’s always tomorrow.  I will admit, I’m really excited to be started research for a new manuscript, and since this one is actually set within the last hundred years, there’s so much more information that’s readily available.  My current bit of source material is a collection of letters between Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany in the days leading up to World War I.  Exciting, eh? Cheers from Norcadia (who’s still a little green around the gills) 

Ahoy literary adventure-seekers!

     Much has happened since our last installment.  I finally received my much coveted copy of Francis the Good, but to something of a mixed reaction.  It was phenomenally helpful in that it provided me with details and juicy letters and other facts that I otherwise wouldn’t have had, but it was remarkably short (only 166 pages), and, as you could gather from the title The Education of an Emperor, it was literally about Francis’s education, which, I must say, was a little dull.

     Once I dissected as much information as I could and plugged it into the manuscript, everything began to come together.  I’m cautiously optimistic that this will be my final draft that I send to my editing team.  Granted, I think I’m still going to review it over the next couple of days to ensure that it’s in good form, but other than that, I think I’m done.  So, where does that leave this blog, you ask?

 

     Well, there’s a couple of places to go from here.  First off, I will still be posting information as I get it from my editors, the publishers I’m chatting up, and what kind (if any) of a publishing deal I’ll get.  The other juicy tidbit I’ll let you in on is the fact that I’ve start preliminary research for a third book.  I’m going to look at the collapse of the Austrian monarchy in 1918 at the end of World War I, but told from the perspectives of the three men whose lives were intimately involved with those last, fateful days: Emperor Francis Joseph, the infamous Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and the late Emperor Charles. 

 

     I’m very excited about getting into this next project.  I learned so much from my second book and I won’t make the same mistakes again.  I have an impressive array of source material, and I’m currently in good-standing with Charles’ son, Crown Prince Otto, so hopefully I can hit him up for another interview (I spoke with him before in regards to my current book).  Sounds exciting eh!  Oh, but sorry lads, my current book and my next one have already been copyrighted, so hands off!

 

     That’s all for now!  Happy writing and I hope to hear from people, Norcadia.

Ahoy blog fans! My misadventures in writing continue on.  To update you from our last episode…I am STILL WAITING for my last bit of source material from http://www.amazon.com.  I ordered a copy of Francis the Good: The Education of an Emperor, 1768-1792, and it’s been three weeks.  Oh my goodness!  I had ordered it with the intention of spending the eight weeks my editing team needed to research and draw on it to improve it.  Now, I have to sit on my hands and twiddle my thumbs hoping this book arrives before my deadline.  Actually, I do have something else to work on.  I stumbled across a marvelous website called http://www.internetarchive.org that has millions of old texts online.  Thanks to this site, I was able to go to libraries and order copies of books I wouldn’t normally have had access to.  I must admit, by using that as a reference source, my manuscript is what it is today. As for the publishers, still no news on that front.  The publisher who left me a message on Monday makes me a little nervous though.  They have some big name people who write for them, but there is also a lot of controversy that seems to surround their company.  I’ve found websites claiming breach of contract, unethical conduct, and the like.  On the one hand, I’ve got to use A LOT of caution in dealing with these people, because I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to bamboozle me into signing a contract, on the other hand, they are an actual publisher, and I’m not exactly in a position to pick and choose.  That is, of course, unless the other two publishers give me the green light, in which case, I’m golden. I shall spend much of this weekend chipping away at this manuscript, while still thinking about my next one.  Sit glued to your screens for next week’s exciting updates in Norcadia’s adventures in blogging! Cheers