Archive - Mar 2007
March 28th
Perspectives
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 03/28/2007 - 10:37Yesterday, Montana Maven pointed me to Jay Rosen’s recent entry on Huffington Post. Jay, together with Arianna Huffington, is searching for ways to get more people to “Participate in Politics by Covering the Campaign”. It is a great idea, which I wish them luck in, but that also raises a few concerns.
Back in January, I wrote a New Year’s resolution post for Gather.com. It was part of my preparation for Journalism that Matters conversation in Memphis. My resolution was to “to help people find their voice”. In Memphis, I refined it further to become, “to help the voiceless find their voice”.
I hope that Jay and Arianna’s efforts will help people find their voice in the political discourse. However, I worry that it might be the same rich white ivy school educated young men that I run into on the blogs and the conferences across our country. I worry that the discourse might end up being not substantially different from the nasty, horse race, Coke or Pepsi type coverage that we see in the traditional mainstream media.
March 27th
Resolutions out the window
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/27/2007 - 17:20Back in January, as I was preparing for a journalism that matters conference, I wrote my New Year’s resolution on Gather.com, “to help people find their voice”.
Yesterday, I received an email from the folks at gather.com asking “It's almost April . . . do you know where your resolutions are?” Yes, I do. They’ve gone out the window.
Let me explain. The New Year came upon me full of hope. There were plenty of opportunities ahead of me to help people find their voice. Yet as the days turned to weeks and on to months, these opportunities have not materialized into what I had dreamed. Yes. I went to the journalism conference, and it was a great event. I got a chance to blog the Libby trial and it changed me. There are more conferences coming up, but few of the things that I had hoped would happen have. It seems like everywhere I turn, I find a new closed door.
Fighting false dichotomies
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/27/2007 - 11:03In his op-ed in the L.A. Times, Ronald Brownstein asks the question, “whether Obama is "blue enough" to increase his support among blue-collar whites.” It is based on a couple false dichotomies that he has set up. He appears to think there are only two candidates that are running for the Democratic nomination, and that there are only two constituency groups, the “upscale "wine track" candidates and blue-collar "beer track" contenders”.
Well, as the great quote, originally from George Bernard Shaw, that Robert Kennedy was so well know for, "Some men see things as they are and say 'Why?' I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'"
The mainstream media is setting up a false dichotomy. It is the same false dichotomy that Sen. Obama spoke about at the Democratic National Convention.
March 26th
Working with Jim
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 03/26/2007 - 12:48Back in January, I wrote a blog post about managing transitions and a new company called CenterNorth. They specialize on the human side of technology leadership and work with companies of all sizes.
Today, I found an article about Leadership Near the Summit. It speaks about an MIT grad climbing his way up to CTO and then facing a difficult annual review. I saw many aspects of myself in that article and at Toomre Capital Markets, we work with some of the brightest engineers out there. We see stories like this all the time.
I’d encourage you to read the article, and if you see characteristics of yourself or people that you’ve worked with in this article, please contact CenterNorth to assist them in their qualitative research into the “best practices for leaders of technical all-stars” You can respond in writing or they will talk to you one on one and will keep all data you provide completely confidential, even in the write up of the report.
(Cross-posted at Toomre Capital Markets)
March 25th
“Right up her ass”
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 03/25/2007 - 09:31It is hard to imagine that I graduated from Mount Greylock Regional High School in Williamstown, MA, thirty years ago this June. Mount Greylock is a great school in a great town, but I rarely reflect back on my experiences there.
One experience, however, has come to mind twice this week for different reasons. It is one of the most memorable experiences I had, one which taught me so much more than many other hours in the classroom.
The year was 1972. America was mired down in an unpopular war abroad. Many people considered the man sitting in the White House a crook. In many ways, it was a year not much different than today.
Back then, there was a draft, and people found different ways to avoid the draft. I had a bunch of longhaired teachers, whom everyone said had become teachers to avoid the draft. Williamstown was a fairly liberal town, so they got away with things they might not have in other towns.
Miranda is now in eighth grade and is reading Lord of the Flies for school. I remember the day that my eighth grade teacher passed out copies of Lord of the Flies to our class. He said he had an important lesson for us and asked us to turn to page 123. I don’t remember the page exactly, but it seemed like a strange place to get introduced to the book we would be reading. About a third of the way down, there was a phrase that had been crossed out by a black magic marker.
“This is called censorship”, the teacher explained. He spoke about how people had complained about the language in the book and gotten the school to cross out the phrase. Visions of teachers, in the teachers lounge, crossing the phrase out in book after book and muttering about the idiocy of the school administration came to mind.
