News Cut: May 7, 2009 Archive

Live chat: Understanding Minnesota's standardized testing

Posted at 9:08 AM on May 7, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Schools

MPR's education reporter, Tom Weber, has a story about the state's standardized testing, in which students -- and this is particularly crucial for high school juniors -- need to show proficiency in math and reading in order to graduate.

So at 9 a.m. on Thursday, Tom is going to be here on News Cut answering your questions about the testing which has just been completed.

What sorts of questions? Let's start with this paragraph in his story:

... what Minnesota and at least two dozen other states do is called 'standard setting.' They establish the grade at which is student is considered proficient, it could be 87 or 57. They find that magic number by first reviewing every test question to see how well students did on each. That's key, according to John Willsee, because it lets everyone know how hard the test was. Willsee teaches educational research at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro.

Wait a second! They establish what "proficient" is after the students have already taken the test and "proficient" is based on how well students did on each?

Willsee's view?

"What they want to do is ensure they don't use these rough rules people grew up with, like 90% is passing. That's actually completely arbitrary. they take all this information into consideration in setting an appropriate cut score that will be fair to test takers."

On the surface, it sounds like we're deciding what "proficient" is after we find out whether the students are.

That's my question for Tom. What's yours? We'll see you here at 9.

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Five at 8: May 7, 2009

Posted at 7:32 AM on May 7, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)

Loss of community?

Posted at 10:20 AM on May 7, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Media

"Hyperlocal" is the new buzzword among newspapers heading for -- or in -- bankruptcy. The theory is that people are more interested in the local spelling bee champ than the Taliban in Pakistan.

But the demise of two community newspapers this week suggests it's not entirely a panacea for what ails the business. The Stillwater Courier and Lake Elmo Leader have gone belly up.

Now, The Bridge, the "longest running community newspaper in Minneapolis," has ceased publication and will go online only.

Hello Seward Listees,

As you can imagine, after twenty years, I've been profoundly troubled by having to pull out of publishing the newsprint version of The Bridge. Unfortunately, the 30% drop in advertising revenue this year made the move a bit more urgent -- OK, a lot more urgent. The good news is, an online publication as a community-building device just makes a
heckuva lot more sense.

Hopefully, delivering The Bridge as an online publication will be a more sustainable model that can deliver richer content, and more opportunity to participate in the storytelling of our neighborhoods. I think you folks on this forum know that better than most.

About half of our budget, ~$8,000, goes towards printing and distributing what was amounting to eight (of 16) tabloid pages of content. Once a month. That's nuts. Don't get me wrong, the marketplace of ads plays an important role, too, but really, its the
journalism we're after.

To make this work, we need to transition half of our average print advertising to online. This will be a challenge, but we are hearing encouraging reactions from many of the hundreds of advertisers who have supported us over the years and can now continue to do so, but less expensively. Also, we hope to find an uptick in financial contributions from users.

If we can bring in $8-$10k per month, we'll be able to keep our editor and ad rep working the same hours and have some left over for content, admin, and web development. Triangle Park Creative will continue to cover shortfalls in overhead and website development costs as best we can.

The nonprofit Southeast Publications board (or a derivative of it) will continue to provide critical support and oversight. The board will also be trying to recruit members from all ten of our Bridgeland neighborhoods. We envision that each neighborhood will eventually have what resembles their own news bureau.

Yes, we will miss sitting with a paper in our lap, but we will not miss the limitations of eight pages of storytelling space once per month. And then there's that increasingly harder-to-justify act of distributing 10,000 pounds of paper throughout the 'hood. We've always dreamed of a more current publication, and now that is possible by shifting our resources to the internet and doing things like broadcasting weekly eNewsletters.

Honestly, in the twenty years I've provided publishing resources to the lineage of the Seward Profile, I've never been so jazzed about the potential of this publication to build connections within our community. Even though combining the Profile and SE Angle was
promising and bought us a couple more years of publishing, this could be a far more sustainable model for delivering hyper-local, diverse, participatory, and timely stories.

Also, as our core business at Triangle Park Creative is shifting to web design, we can better support the project in some extraordinary ways, just as we did with the paper version for half of its 40-year existence. I'm not sure we are ahead of the curve now, but with your help, we can turn this crisis into a remarkable model of web-based community journalism.

So, please, please, PLEASE help us register as many online subscriber/supporters as you can. Send your network to: www.readthebridge.info (.com, .net, .org) and ask them to create a user account. We're not asking for money at this time, just a couple of check marks in boxes.

We think a key to success is gathering a critical mass of subscribers to leverage marketing, and frankly, justify the effort. What that number is, we don't know. We're guessing 7,500. Since you are on this list-serve, I suspect you already recognize the potential and how it will help what you are doing here, as well.

Let's keep the longest running community news publication in Minneapolis alive.

Thoughts?

Dan Nordley

One of the problems of community newspapers is there isn't much "community" around anymore. Some neighborhoods and cities, of course, are closer than others, but fewer and fewer people identify with where they live.

(h/t: Julia Schrenkler)

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GM's losses

Posted at 12:07 PM on May 7, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Economy

Things didn't get any better for General Motors in the first quarter of the year, according to results released by the company today.

It posted a $6 billion first-quarter loss and spent $10.2 billion more cash than it took in during the first three months of the year.

How much is the $10.2 billion in cash the company burned in the quarter?

How much is the Web worth?

Posted at 1:52 PM on May 7, 2009 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)
Filed under: Economy, Media

Would you pay for content on the Web?

Rupert Murdoch, the money behind Fox and the Wall St. Journal, expects to start charging you for access to his Web sites within a year.

"We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning," he says.

It's the sort of thing newspaper owners dream of during periods of REM sleep. But it's been tried a few times, with fairly mixed results. People will pay for porn; they won't pay for news.

Is there any scenario that you'd pay for news on the Web?

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Et tu, Manny?

Posted at 3:34 PM on May 7, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Sports

Manny Ramirez today became the latest star baseball player to be caught cheating. It turns out he was on a women's fertility drug that dopers use to cover up their steroid use.

The Red Sox won two championships with Ramirez (disclaimer: I'm the biggest Manny Ramirez fan in America). In 2004, he propelled the team with 43 homers. He was, until today, a sure Hall of Famer. He's #17 on the All-time homerun list. Five of the players ahead of him on that list are also confirmed or suspected users.

ESPN's Bill Simmons, in a biting piece of satire, suggests that it's impossible not to suspect a player who performs well, is cheating:

"And what about Big Papi?" he wonders. "Played for Minnesota, didn't hit for power, came to the Red Sox, turned into the best slugger in the league, and as soon as they cracked down on steroids, he stopped hitting homers again. And he was friends with all the other Dominican players who were linked to performance-enhancing drugs. What about him?"

Silence. Nobody says anything.

Finally, my dad steps in: "He had an inside-outside swing at Minnesota, when he came to Boston, we encouraged him to pull the ball, so ..."

"Come on, Gramps!" my son says. "That's dumb, and you know it."

Based on their performance so far, we can safely speculate the Minnesota Twins are the cleanest team in sports.

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What are you entitled to?

Posted at 9:20 PM on May 7, 2009 by Bob Collins (28 Comments)
Filed under: Economy

A few months ago, when I finished the News Cut on Campus "tour," I wrote this piece: Optimism, pessimissm, and the college graduate.

A writer I very much admire, Lane Wallace of The Atlantic, wrote about that piece today on her online column.

Perhaps Minnesotans are particularly good at accepting life in all its uncertainty and challenge. This is a place, after all, where it's been known to snow in every month of the year, and people have to shovel their roofs as well as their walks. I'm not kidding. I've done it, myself. If you want an easy ride in life, with palm trees and year-round sunshine, you don't settle in Minnesota. But whatever the reason, Collins' advice is a valuable reality check--not only on the current economic situation, but on how all of us, media included, can or should respond to it.

But it was a comment from -- I presume -- a young 'un that got my attention:

Sure the challenges of adulthood are nothing new, but who over 50 graduated college with $50k in student loans and credit card debt? When you're starting out with that kind of burden, never mind the recession, of course there's anxiety. It has nothing to do with the abstract future or achieving your dreams. It's the present, and working for $110 a week or its modern-day equivalent won't cut it. Collins' advice and this post basically ignore that for a lot of recent graduates, there's no time not to be conservative and risk averse. But if you're 50, established and debt-free, well I guess it's fair to look back and wonder if you could have been more care-free, too.

.. and so I responded...

Let's do the math on that. Let's see, I graduated (1976) with $4,000 in debt and a job that paid $5,720 a year. My debt was 69% of my annual salary.

The average student loan debt last year was not, in fact, $50,000, it was $21,899. The average income for graduating seniors in 2007 was $60,000 $46,000, making the total debt 36.5% 47.6% of annual salary.

Are there exceptions? Of course there are. But my point is a simple one to today's kids: You're not the exception you think you are. It's the last thing you will likely learn as part of your college education: Some people do know what they're talking about. The best way to get ahead of the game, is to listen.

But you're right, $110 in today's dollars -- which would be $400 a week -- isn't going to cut it. But here's what you don't understand: It didn't cut it then, either.

That's the point: We weren't entitled then. You're not entitled now.

Go forth, work hard, experience life. Make yourself special.

Graduating seniors: What are you expecting the world owes you starting next month?

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