FREE WHITEWATER

Writing

Daily Bread, Wisconsin, Writing

Daily Bread for 8.30.24: Poet Anja Notanja Sieger Types Your Story

by  •  •  Comments

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 79. Sunrise is 6:18, and sunset is 7:31, for 13h 12m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862,  Wisconsin troops rest on the White House lawn:

The 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin Infantry regiments fought in the Second Battle of Bull Run. By the end of this third day, more than 18,000 soldiers had been killed or wounded and Union forces had been pushed back to Washington, D.C. When the Wisconsin regiments arrived in Washington, they rested on the White House lawn. According to historian Frank Klement, “President Lincoln came out with a pail of water in one hand and a dipper in the other. He moved among the men, offering water to the tired and thirsty. Some Wisconsin soldiers drank from the common dipper and thanked the President for his kindness.”

On this day in 1945, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Douglas MacArthur, lands at Atsugi Air Force Base.

‘Writing is listening’ Poet Anja Notanja Sieger types your story | Wisconsin Life:

Setting up a vintage typewriter in public spaces throughout Milwaukee, poet and performance artist Anja Notanja Sieger crafts custom poems on demand that create intimate connections with her audience. From anxious poems to marriage vows, Sieger’s spontaneous creativity has made her and her typewriter poetry beloved in the city’s cultural scene.

Blogging, Writing

Aggregation, Curation, and Commentary

by  •  •  Comments

Here’s a quick post based on an email and reply from last night about the differences between aggregation, curation, and commentary (from my viewpoint). An aggregation site receives stories or news releases to post, and publishes them based on an intentionally loose set of criteria to maximize the number of posts. Ideally – and it’s…

Assault Awareness & Prevention, Hunger, Language, Public Relations, University, UW System, Writing

At UW-Whitewater, For All That Value, Too Little Administrative Respect for Values

by  •  • 4 Comments

There’s a press release (screenshot here) contending that UW-Whitewater contributes a large sum – hundreds of millions – to the Wisconsin economy. The release is written by Assistant Vice Chancellor Sara Kuhl. Kuhl begins the release touting the power and influence of the university by misspelling a common English word (emphasis added): UW-Whitewater, one of…

Assault Awareness & Prevention, Crime, Language, Newspapers, Writing

Janesville Gazette’s Reprehensible Story About an Alleged Sexual Assault

by  •  • 4 Comments

At the nearby Janesville Gazette, there’s a story about an alleged sexual assault that’s simply reprehensible reporting: Excessive drinking was prelude to sex assault, court document alleges. (The reporter, Frank Schultz; editor, Sid Schwartz.) Here’s how Schultz’s story begins – a single-sentence first paragraph: An 18-year-old Janesville man is accused of second-degree sexual assault after…

America, Language, Newspapers, Trump, Writing

Why Feature Stories on Major Topics are Now Often a Waste of Time

by  •  • 1 Comment

Feature stories on major topics, in which the author begins a multi-paragraph description of a person or scene before offering a substantive consideration of the topic, have today little use in newspapers.  These stories are meant to set a scene, and perhaps evoke emotions in readers who are, the author presumes, indifferent or ignorant of…

City, Education, Language, Newspapers, School District, University, Writing

The Janesville Gazette‘s Sketchy Reporting on Major Topics

by  •  • 3 Comments

The nearby Janesville Gazette, a newspaper that insists ‘local matters,’ too often reports on Whitewater’s local matters in a careless way, ignoring key information.  Whether that paper’s omissions are through negligence or by design, reporting like this ill-serves Whitewater. (In fairness, the Gazette long ago ran itself into the ground, and sold out this summer…

Babbittry, CDA, Culture, Economy, Fortitude, Local Government, Marketing, New Media, New Whitewater, Newspapers, Politics, Press, Social Media, Writing

What Can Be Done About Rural Newspapers (Even Though It Probably Won’t Be)?

by  •  • 1 Comment

Yesterday I wrote that Another Local Paper Changes Hands. With the failure of legacy publishing, what are rural communities to do? (Obvious point: FREE WHITEWATER is not an online newspaper – never aspired to be, never will be. This is a website of independent commentary: aligned with no faction, beholden to no faction.) A few…

America, Babbittry, City, History, New Media, Newspapers, Press, Social Media, Writing

The Media’s ‘Post-Advertising’ Future

by  •  •  Comments

Nationally and locally, the media (whether profit or non-profit) continue their significant transformation: the decline of print, the rise of (interactive) digital media, and the collapse of a middle-of-the-road partnership of boosterism between mediocre newspapers and middling officials. Print’s doomed, and so is digital that merely repeats the same banal style of contemporary print. Traditional…

Foreign Affairs, Politics, Trump, Writing

Lauren Duca humbly presents…

by  •  •  Comments

Chris Cillizza, formerly of the Washington Post, presently of CNN, eternally a buffoon, wrote today that he thought Trump’s United Nations address was “much more poetic” than Trump’s prior speeches. From this, one can say that CNN wastes at least as much money as Cillizza’s salary & benefits. (There are, probably, vile limericks that are…

New Media, Writing

The Spacing of Words to Come

by  •  •  Comments

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.  After jumping over the dog, the fox typed into his journal using two spaces between sentences. Over at Caffeinated Politics that there’s a light-hearted post about whether proper punctuation allows two spaces between sentences, or somehow requires only one space. See, Two Spaces After A Period…

Federal Government, Freedom of Speech, Liberty, Local Government, New Media, Open Government, Politics, State Government, Writing

Steps for Blogging on a Policy or Proposal

by  •  •  Comments

For bloggers who cover politics, policy-making, etc., just as would have been true of essayists and pamphleteers in an earlier time, it helps to have a method to one’s writing.  In the paragraphs below, I’ll list steps one should take when approaching a topic. The steps are in a rough order, but in any method,…