Burnin’

Editor & Publisher picked up a Poynter study on media consumption.

In a surprise finding, online readers finish news stories more often than those who read in print, according to the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack study released Wednesday at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference here.

When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids.

In addition, nearly two-thirds of online readers read all of the text of a particular story once they began to read it, the survey revealed. In print, 68% of tabloid readers continued reading a specific story through the jump to another page, while 59% did so in broadsheet reading.

That Little Round-Headed Boy looks critically at Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley’s Ten Days In The Hills.

According to his review on New Critics, Smiley’s novel concerns a group of Los Angelenos who, the day after the 2003 Oscars, gather in a film director’s spacious home and try to shield themselves from the Iraq war, even as raging debates break out among the characters.

The book is 449 pages, in really small type, and it sometimes gets lost in its tangents, but Smiley has a marvelous gift for creating characters with compelling flaws and for writing great gabs of free-flowing dialogue. It’s a book that may wear you out getting to the finish line, but it keeps pulling you forward nonetheless. It has the rounded pleasures of those old-fashioned pop blockbusters that weren’t afraid to lace a little intelligent dialogue and subtle characterization in between scenes of beautiful people having sex in gorgeously appointed homes.

The book begins with Max and his lover Elena, in bed, the morning after attending the Oscars. They are talking about the glamorous evening, and Michael Moore getting booed, and the war, and how Max wants to make a small movie of him and Elena that would do for the indie sex film what My Dinner With Andre did for the indie yapping-and-gnoshing film.

The most fascinating character to me is Elena, a woman who is obsessed with the Iraq War. I’ve met her type in real life, but never in fiction: the person who simply boils with righteous, unceasing hatred for the Bush administration and everything it stands for. What Smiley captures here, almost without you realizing it at first, is this notion of how people endure during dark ages.

Sounds good.

We just spent 10 action-packed days in Austin for SXSW. Austin is a great American city (GAC)—one we hadn’t visited in four years. During South By there are a million places to be and even more things to do. It’s a challenge to shrink it all down to manageable portions. But one way to do this is to focus on a neighborhood. To go hyper local, as it were. And there’s no better place in Austin to do this than on South Congress Avenue.

Less than a mile from downtown, South Congress or SoCo, offers a multiple block strectch of retail establishments, hotels, restaurants and music venues—all of which rank as some of the best in Austin. The Continental Club is arguably the anchoring establishment, with competition for that title coming from Guero’s Taco Bar, Hotel San Jose and Jo’s Coffee. Other noteworthy spots on SoCo include Allen Boot Company, Austin Motel, South Congress Café and Home Slice Pizza. Further south, we found Magnolia Café—an all night munchie palace with tons of local flavor.

The hilly neighborhoods that flank the east and west sides of South Congress are populated with street after street of classic bungalows built in the 1920s and 1930s. Many have been remodeled. Others wait for the tender loving care of new well-heeled owners.

Given that we live in a gated community with strict regulations requiring conformity, it was a pleasure to see Austinites freely flying their freak flags. We rented a lovely cottage in Travis Heights for our stay, and while there the neighbor across the street placed a sign in her yard that read, “No War. No Empire. No Occupation.” I want one of those! We can’t place it in our front yard for all Rose Hill to see, but we can place it in our front window to remind ourselves that we’re not alone in the fight to save America, and maybe our sanity in the process.

Island Packet columnist and long time Lowcountry resident, David Lauderdale, unloads in his front page opinion piece today. He says Bluffton’s natural beauty makes it a unique place to live, and that it’s wrong to apply the same standards here that are relied upon in “Anywhereville, U.S.A.”

Here’s the essence of Lauderdale’s argument:

In the past five years, Beaufort County has issued more than 10,000 building permits in greater Bluffton, and the town of Bluffton issued more than 3,400. Too few people oversaw the environmental impact of all this construction.

Our dear, wacky Bluffton has been turned into a verb. People now refer to unchecked growth as getting “Blufftonized.” Getting Blufftonized means too much, too fast. It means developers set the pace. It means years of citizen outcry goes largely unheeded. It means sitting in traffic. It means do-it-yesterday growth takes control when local governments need to say, “Do it our way, or hit the highway.”

We need the same things today that were asked for a decade ago: a limited-access bypass, secondary roads, interconnected neighborhoods, parks, and a throttle on the rate of growth so it is timed to the availability of roads, schools and parks.

We need to plant tens of thousands of oak trees all over Okatie. We need a land-buying program for Bluffton.

We need strong enforcement of the laws and regulations already on the books.

Personally, I’ve never seen anything like Bluffton. The pace of building is astounding. When we moved here just over two years ago, I said in jest that soon there would be an interstate running from downtown Bluffton to downtown Savannah, replacing the tree-lined two-lane roads. Having taken those roads to and from Savannah yesterday, I can see that my “joke” is fast becoming reality.

I’m loving Frontline’s “News War” multipart documentary. Watching a 90-minute installment the other night on my local PBS station afforded me the opportunity to hear from John Carroll. Carroll, now at Harvard, was the editor of the Los Angeles Times and prior to that, the Baltimore Sun. The way he speaks about newspapers really resonates with me.

Here’s a small slice of his interview, care of the PBS website:

I estimate that roughly 85 percent of the original reporting that gets done in America gets done by newspapers. They’re the people who are going out and knocking on doors and rummaging through records and covering events and so on. And most of the other media that provide news to people are really recycling news that’s gathered by newspapers.

It is very evident that the new media, the media that are coming along with the Web, are investing almost nothing in original reporting. If newspapers fall by the wayside, who’s going to do the reporting? What will we know? Who will stand up [against] the government when the government, for example, nullifies a couple of generations of law and secretly decides to wiretap us? Who will go to the courthouse? Who will go the police station in all the towns across America and make sure that things are being done properly? Who will examine all the people who seek to become political officeholders in the United States?

On why people go into journalism in the first place:

I think journalists — good journalists — have always looked upon themselves as public servants. … I don’t know why they want to go into it. I don’t think it’s really the money. The money’s pretty bad unless you become a superstar. I think it’s a combination of things. For a certain type of person, … it’s just an exciting way to make a living. It’s an exciting job. It’s fun. It gives you an excuse to satisfy your curiosity, gives you a reason to ask people questions and talk with interesting people and see interesting things, … and you get paid for it. … Just the sheer entertainment and satisfaction of crafting a story and seeing it in the paper, that in itself is a reason to go into it.

Then when you sit back and you think, well, is there a larger purpose to it? Yes. I’ve been involved in stories that have actually done some good for people. You have, too, stories that may have saved lives, stories that have increased the quality of justice in America, stories that have enlightened the public in helping to exercise their vote with more pertinent information.

So in the reflective moments, you can say not only am I entertaining myself; I’m actually doing some good.

And here he is speaking to the economics of the newpaper business:

Wall Street and corporations are becoming disillusioned with owning newspapers. … They’re extremely profitable — they make barrels full of money — but they don’t grow much from year to year. Let me illustrate. … A typical newspaper makes a 20 percent operating margin. That’s roughly double what the typical Fortune 500 company makes. They’re very profitable. … This is true at the Los Angeles Times; it’s true at the Baltimore Sun, where I used to be editor; it’s true at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky, which is a money-making machine. People think of this as a washed-up old business. It’s not.

It makes tons of money. But the owners are under great pressure to increase earning.

To sum up, journalism is a noble profession and the support beams of American democracy. Good reporters seek to reveal the truth and their actions turn a mean buck for the capitalists who organize them and distribute their work.