Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Essay: Junk news



Junk News

By John William Tuohy


A worldwide news flash, reported by a lazy and gullible media, was actually old news based on junk science. 

Here’s what happened.

In mid-March, the Journal of Forensic Sciences published a paper that stated as fact that the actual identity of London’s famous Jack the Ripper was an insane Polish barber named Aaron Kosminski. The paper's author claimed that new DNA evidence,  blood stains on a silk shawl that may (or may not) have belonged to Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper's victims.
The international media ran with the story, stating as an absolute fact that Jack the Ripper’s identity was now known and that the DNA evidence used was new. However, the research wasn’t new and appears to be scientifically inaccurate. The DNA-Aaron Kosminski as the Ripper story has been around since at least 2014.
The science is so bad that a geneticist at the University of Leicester, whose team did the genome sequencing of Richard III, called the new paper "unpublishable" on Twitter, asking, "How did this ever get past peer review?"
The sketchy research work was done by Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores
University and David Miller of the University of Leeds. The two based their claims on DNA taken from a shawl that supposedly belonged to the before mentioned Catherine Eddowes. A writer named Russell Edwards bought the shawl at auction in 2007 and allowed Louhelainen and Moores to run a DNA analysis on it.
Louhelainen has stated that the DNA on the shawl evidence would never stand up
in court. One of the reasons it would get tossed out of court is that DNA is
passed from a mother to her children, which would link Eddowes with her maternal
descendants but not for the descendants of Kosminski, which begs the question;
how do we know the DNA found the garment belonged to him?
Among other things, there is no conclusive proof that the shawl ever belonged to the victim (Catherine Eddowes) and even if she did own it, there is no evidence….at all….that she was wearing it on the night she was murdered. As for the blood spatter and semen found on the shawl, Louhelainen and Moores can only "hypothesize" (a fancy word for wild ass guess) that the stains are related to the victim and the killer. Adding to the dubiousness of the findings is the fact that the shawl has been handled extensively over decades without any precautions to avoid contamination.
So how did this non-story became a headline? It became headline news because lazy journalists didn’t bother to check the sources and the validity of the story. But the larger question is; Why? Why did the story make the news? Because the monster of around-the-clock, seven days a week, relentless “news” needs to be fed, that’s why. Junk news doesn’t always infiltrate mainline news, it's often placed there on purpose.
The news monster can make the smallest thing and turn it into a mountain of vast importance, all of it for the end results of exploiting and antagonizing us and our emotions. They do it because TV news editors are faced with infinite space to fill and there’s a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars actually, in filling that space.
One of the results of around the clock news is that we have A LOT more “news” now than we have ever had before and as a by-product of that, we have a lot more Jack-the Ripper-DNA-non-stories-tossed out at us. In other words, we are now being inundated with junk news…the purposely misleading, the unimportant and refried served as new and important news…..and it shows no signs of going away.
One of the many reasons junk news isn’t going away is because we keep feeding the fire of junk news by reading and watching it. We, all of us, are the reason junk news exists. I’m not talking about the junk news that makes the airwaves that is erroneous, like the Jack the Ripper-DNA thing. I’m talking about air-head news. The useless fluff pushed by the media on their prospective news centers to keep readership high. We read it, we love it and we demand more of the same.
Then we have news alerts on our and alerts for texts. Almost everyone is wired into some sort of social media and Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all push their own form of Junk news and when mainline journalism flies some junk news up the flag pole, social media is more than happy to spread it on their platforms. They get the junk news third hand, for free, they know it will attract readers and they publish it.
So why is junk news an issue? Because it takes away from the quality of our lives, it steals precious moments from us. Moments, investments of our limited life span, that we can’t get back. Junk news, even seconds of it, takes away time better spent in a hundred different ways.
How do we stop the growth of junk news? There isn’t a lot we can do about that except not to get our news from one source. Verifying stories would stop a lot of junk news dead in its path, so would teaching journalist a thing or two about ethical standards but those two things won’t happen because of the bottom line. Dinosaur media….newspapers…can’t afford to verify a story beyond a phone call to what they guess might be the source. Online reporting, although it’s very profitable when it succeeds isn’t going to do a damn thing that will turn away click to their sites and the new TV around the clock media generally lacks the professionalism and the standards to kill a junk news story. Money is money after all.



A short poem about the joy of a new love affair.



Since feeling is first
E. E. Cummings
   
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis



Essay: Detoxing my writing from Social Media



Detoxing my writing from Social Media

By
John William Tuohy


“It would only be necessary for a writer to secure universal popularity if imagination and intelligence were equally distributed among all men.” Auden on Writing, Originality, Self-Criticism, and How to Be a Good Reader




Well, the title isn’t totally true. I have minimalized social media in my life, and in a way, it is a like a detox (I have never actually detoxed from anything, so that’s a shot in the dark) But, to be clear, I haven’t quit social media.

So while I detox from overusing…that’s really the key word here….overuse… social media, I am not about to toss the baby out with the bath water. I have simply placed limits on my use of social media. My plan now is, that with no notifications to check, no photos to look at, and no gifs to retweet, to spend my time learning my craft, the writing craft, become much more productive in my writings and creating better books as a result.

Will I ever get off of social media completely? No, of course not. Things are changing. For the past decade, one of the first things I would in the morning after coffee was to check Facebook and the weather app. Now I walk the dogs around the yard instead and take a guess at what the weather will be that day. But still, I do miss my Facebook pages and my blogs.

Despite the growing negative clamor surrounding social media by the thinking crowd, social media does serve a purpose and it isn’t evil. In fact, its as far from evil as one can get. The only real danger of social media, something that could actually harm you, is that it’s easy to live in a virtual life on social media, rather than making real life off of social media. I’ll give you an example. If I quit Facebook permanently, I question how many of the 450 people that Facebook calls my friends, would remain in contact with me. Very few, I suspect because most of them are empty connections.

By the way, I had a lot more than 450 friends once. Then the Presidential election 2016 happened and it all hit the fan, the ugliness of political intolerance. Some people dropped me from their friends' list when I made my political leanings known. And I dropped others because their political proselytizing was endless. Eventually, in the name of peace and sanity, I stopped posting anything political then I simply dropped people who wouldn’t stop posting things political.

Another negative is that Facebook put me back in touch with people I had long ago moved away from. Once I was back in touch with them I came to realize there was actually a pretty good reason I moved them out of my life. I changed, they changed, and some didn’t change at all, all of which wasn’t necessarily good.

I also met up with some people some fairly appalling human being that, had I met them in person, I would have avoided but that’s the wonderful thing, and the awful thing, about being on social media is one can edit themselves into perfection. We can edit their interactions, edit their cleverness edit our humor. Social media allows us to present to the world the person we love the world to see. That isn’t inherently bad as much as it is human nature.

As a side note, I stopped Yelping as well. My wife and I are amateur, but dedicated chefs, and we’re darn good cooks, so we mostly eat at home or a few tried and trusted better restaurants we like. Occasionally, usually, when we’re on the road we’ll dine out a better restaurant.

We happily pay the higher prices, but we expect the quality of the food and service to match those prices, when they didn’t, I would write a stinging review without qualms. Many times the restaurant owner or the restaurant staff would scribble a sentence or two in their defense of poor service and overpriced unprepared meals and the back and forth would begin, almost always ending with the restaurant people calling me a nasty name or worse. After one of those incidents, I asked myself “What the hell are you doing?” and I signed off of Yelp forever and have never missed it.

Anyway, I doubt, very much, the claims that social media is destroying the fabric of society. In fact, it’s a ridiculous claim made by people who have no concept of the complexity of societies fabric. The fact is that social media has done far more good than bad in American life.

Yes, social media often distorts things, but so does television and film, literature, lawyers and college professors with a bias. True, social media can be a mindless distraction and it can, in fact, it often does bring out the pettiness in people, largely because it allows the cowards of the world to strike out or voice a nasty opinion without using their names.

Remember there is a good deal of enjoyment to be had with Facebook and Blogger and I’ll probably always participate on some level, just not with the same intensity, before my withdrawal. I still spend hours, dozens and dozens of hours, doing research online and I don’t think that will ever change, in fact, if I had to choose one thing to thing to read on a desert Island it would be Newspapers.Com, the best $25 a month any writer can spend on anything.

It isn’t just Facebook and Yelp I’m cutting back on. I’ve canceled ten blogs that I ran that covered various subjects. I had three email accounts and dropped two of them along with the dozens and dozens of Google alerts I had assigned to them. I have one Hotmail account now and I’ve vowed to check no more than twice a day. I have deleted most of the apps I use, but not all of them.

To be clear, I was never active very many social media sites. I am too damn old to be bothered with Snapchat, Twitter confuses me, whatever else Twitter might do, it doesn’t sell books and I have no use to be on LinkedIn. I don’t Instagram, mostly because I don’t know how, nor do I understand what it could do for me as a writer. And that’s what started all of this social media silliness I now have to detox myself from.

As of about ten years ago, I started a second career as a full-time writer. I write primarily non-fiction, stage plays, and some fiction. I’ve had a bit of success in each genre. My novels and short stories sell…okay, their not leaping off of Amazon’s shelves but their not comatose either.
I am primarily a non-fiction writer. When the “publish yourself” wave came along, I was a willing surfer. I write about true crime, organized crime and pop history. Fiction sell wells, but better than fiction and in total, on a good month, I make about five or six hundred a month from books sales.

Still, I want my books to sell and when, just over a decade ago, digital marketing became the shiny new promise for authors, I leaped on that bandwagon. I sat down and charted out an invasion on social media to bring readers to my books.

Self-promotion is a necessary evil for writers and since Blogs and Facebook are free and can reach an international audience, I decided to build a marketing network of blogs and Facebook pages to promote my works.

Here’s some solid advice for new writers. Learn the in’s and outs of book publicity, especially if you plan to stay with on the traditional publishing route. One of the very first questions a publisher will ask is “How do YOU plan to publicize your book?”

Even the large publishing houses are severely cutting back on PR staff (and editors too) Not that PR people in most publishing houses were all that good anyway. I published with standard sized New York houses. One of the publicity people I was assigned to had been a strip promotor in her last job and the other was a smart ass kid straight out of college. Neither of them did a very good job and I ended up doing all my own publicity without them. In fact, I found the entire “working with a publisher business” to be a galling experience.

But if you are a budding writer, don’t do as I do. You should try to publish with a house before running off to publish your own work on Amazon. It will be good for your ego, good for your resume and good for your pocketbook. I’m old. I have a lifetime filled with achievements. The two books I published with New York houses are still in print, my plays have won distinguished awards. I’m me, you be you. I chart my own course as a writer. I try, desperately, to stay as far away as I can from the publishing world. I don’t want, nor do I need to be, part of a writing community. I studiously avoid other writers. I’m not an unfriendly guy, I'm very much the opposite in fact, but writing is not a team sport. Writing consists of the writer and the writer alone. And that, my friends, is the beauty and the misery of the craft.

Back to the issue at hand. I built a series of Blogs on Blogger, a free site that allows the blogger a good deal of freedom in designing their blogs and each one comes with a quick and simple means to repost the blog on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, another blog and a Hotmail connection.

I also built a series, about twenty in all, of Facebook pages, which are also free. Each blog and page was about the various subjects that interest me….Greek philosophy, Roman history, writing, photography….all it created under the theory that if those subjects and many others fascinated me, they fascinate others and I was write about that. The readership for these outlets was in the hundreds of thousands. One of them “Child of the Sixties Forever” had close to two million reads. Working on the established fact that content is king, a changed the features on all of these pages at least once a week, usually more. And to find that content I scoured Tumbler, another free service that carries wonderful photographs and articles which can be tailored to your interests. I covered each blog and Facebook page with covers of my various books added a direct link to Amazon along with each cover.

But, after years and years of this, nothing dramatic was happening with my sales. I had a good strong, healthy following and high visibility on my postings but when I compared the numbers of people following my various sites to my books sales, the two didn’t match up, if they did I would be a millionaire from books sales many times over.

It turns out that social media isn't ideal for selling books, but it can help, a little. That’s the point to remember, it only helps a little. Social media is only a moderately good tool to market our work. However, social media seems to help writers who are already selling well on a national basis, but otherwise, people don’t generally go on social media to find new books to buy.

I really did have a sort of micro-empire going on, but to what end? I had to ask myself “Is this time well spent?” and the answer kept coming up “No.” But, I’m sorry to say, I continued on anyway, because of the ease of it all. I have, at my fingertips, no matter where I am, a computer, an iPad and a cell phone that can put on to the media within seconds. And so, over time, social media had become my yearbook, a diary, my photo album, and my personal PR team.

Aside from ease of use, I think I lost my way, I had confused productively keeping my outlets fresh with new content over selling books and make an income for myself. The other bit of confusion that I created for myself was the belief that my writing voice had to be heard through my random postings and the occasional article I would write, and the truth was, my voice wasn’t being heard because what I was writing was painfully brief and not terribly passionate or interesting.

 I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.


So, basically, a cat burglar stole a copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird”, talk about irony.



Burglar hits legendary bookstore, steals rare edition of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
By MICHAEL SCHAUB

Police in suburban Philadelphia are on the hunt for a book thief with rarefied literary tastes.
A burglar stole at least 20 books from a store in West Chester, Pa., including a rare edition of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Tuesday.
No money was stolen from the bookstore's cash register, said Fred Dannaway, the assistant manager of Baldwin's Book Barn, a well-known and long-running retailer located in a 19th century barn.
"It was apparent they knew what they wanted," Dannaway said. The thief apparently shattered a window to gain access to the store.
 The stolen books were worth as much as $10,000, CBS reports.
Dannaway urged the thief to return the stolen merchandise, which also included a rare edition of John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men."
"Bring them back, bring them back," he said. "They’re significant things. If we don’t sell them, we’d just like to have them around. That’s what book people like to do."
Store manager Carol Rauch told WPVI-TV that the theft was discovered by employees over the weekend.
"Saw glass on the floor, came in. The books are all gone from the two cabinets," Rauch said. "One was a very expensive book on fish, another one was a German Bible with a sterling silver working clasp."
Rare books weren't the only thing the thief made off with. The Daily Local News of Chester County, Pa., reports that an oil painting of the barn that houses the bookstore was also stolen.
Baldwin's Book Barn is a legendary bookseller in Pennsylvania. Founded in 1934, the store is housed in a five-story dairy barn that dates back to 1822. The store contains more than 300,000 books.
Atlas Obscura describes the retailer as "the TARDIS of bookstores," a reference to the time-traveling phone booth featured in the television series "Doctor Who."
"Hidden within its meandering coves and staircases lie seemingly endless archival treasures lining every space within the Book Barn," the website says. "Step inside and you are transported to another time and place; where history seems to whisper to you through the creaking windows and stairs of the barn."
The owners of the store plan to beef up their security system in the wake of the burglary. Dannaway told the Inquirer that they had turned off the store's motion-activated security system because it was regularly being set off by the cats who call the store home.